Re: RFC GnomeGoal #3

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-08-11 at 11:03 -0700, David Trowbridge wrote:
> gnome_config is deprecated, in favor of GKeyFile.
> 
> Unfortunately, GKeyFile is a lower-level API than gnome_config, making
> you do things like figure out where to put the file yourself (and
> really, with key:value files, figuring out where to put it is the
> harder part).

The API reference page has this to say:

  The purpose of this module is different in GNOME 2 from what it
  was in GNOME 1. General applications should use the gnome-gconf
  module for their configuration requirements.

It said that back in 2003 as well, when I first wrote the code in
Yelp to save the window size.  And yet, the GConf documentation
said not to use GConf for this purpose, so what was I to do?

I don't think it's generally a good idea for us to deprecate APIs
in favor of new APIs that are considerably harder to deal with.
If we're going to tell people not to use gnome_config, then we
should give them an API that doesn't involve writing three times
as much code.

Note that I think the generalized GKeyFile API is a good thing,
and it's very simple and effective for a lot of things.  But we
should also have a higher-level API that addresses this very
common need more directly.  The gnome_config API is relatively
simple for this task.  Even simpler would be if I didn't have
to write a boilerplate callback, but could instead just tell
the library what properties to watch for various keys.

--
Shaun