A few comments on the DB topic. 1. It was commented that a DB's too heavy for things like egg-recent. Alone, that might be true. But how many places could a database come in handy? If used all over, it could provide great features, polish, and speed up development time. 2. On requiring a system daemon. I've seen a few databases added to other projects by reassigning the port number/socket. We could easily provide a special config file for PostgreSQL or another DB to run one per user. We could provide the package as part of GNOME so we can automatically configure it, set it up for the user, add our schema, etc. Nothing extra for a user to do that he doesn't already need to. 3. A DB in no way replaces a file system. As previously mentioned, they are really bad at hierarchical data. But, file systems are bad at relational data. What we really need is both, not to ignore the benefits of RDBMS because they aren't file systems. 4. On GNOME-DB. I would really like to see this used, but no offense to the hard workers on the GNOME-DB team, but when is it going to be ready for real use? I've been watching it from time to time ever since it started. I tried it again today. It still doesn't work reliably. The project shows great promise, but seems to be making little progress in the many years its been in development. (Please prove me wrong. :) On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 19:48, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote: > Jan Morén wrote: > > Third, and practically, if I already have a DB installed and running for > > other reasons (MySQL, just for the sake of discussion), the last thing I > > want is to have to care and feed _another_ DB server just because people > > on d-d-l had different preferences. > > > > Let Markus run Postgres, let Jamie run Firebird, let me run MySQL, and > > perhaps have SQlite as the default, built-in provider in case no DB is > > actually installed by the user? > > Requiring any full-featured RDBMS for the desktop sounds quite wrong. > I'm not sure what the situation is with Firebird, but for Postgres and > MySQL, it's a system-wide service, not a per-user service -- having to > administer this ominous database thing for the desktop seems like > massive overkill. What happens if I want to later use postgres for my > own things, and I decide to change its config settings -- does gnome > stop working because I changed the auth types? Do I have to run a > second instance of postgres|mysql|etc? When a user wants to move their > home directory elsewhere, do they have to remember to dump the gnome > tables from postgres, too? > > Looking at Firebird, it seems to be embeddable, along with SQLite. If > the desktop needs an RDBMS, it should probably be a per-user gnome > specific daemon that embeds some RDMBS at the back end. Use gnome-db to > access it, but set Firebird or equivalent as the minimum required > feature set -- there still will be incompatabilities, especially if > stored procedures are used. The db can then live in the home directory > and get created along with the normal ~/.gnome* population, and be used > just for gnome. SQLite's a great choice, but it's fairly weak as far as > "extra" SQL features goes -- do you really need stored procedures on the > desktop, though? > > - Vlad > > _______________________________________________ > desktop-devel-list mailing list > desktop-devel-list gnome org > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list -- Bob Smith <bob thestuff net>
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