Re: RFC GnomeGoal #3

[Germán Poó Caamaño <gpoo ubiobio cl>]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 12:30 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote: 
> On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 12:37 -0400, Germán Poó Caamaño wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 11:18 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> > > On Sat, 2006-08-12 at 12:00 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> > > 
> > > > libgconf-bridge doesn't handle per-machine state yet, but it will handle
> > > > multiple windows just fine: you give it a gconf path prefix to persist
> > > > the states at, so for different windows the program can generate
> > > > different prefixes.
> > > 
> > > Interesting!  Great to have working code.  Can you please add a link to
> > > it to the wiki?
> > > 
> > > 	http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/SaveState
> > > 
> > > I've added an important requirement:  we need to be able to purge old
> > > keys when they are no longer needed.  We need apps to be able to say, "I
> > > no longer care about this window's state; please erase whatever you may
> > > have put into GConf".
> > 
> > IMHO, it could be better the opposite approach: "I do care only about
> > these group of keys, please GConf/Whatever delete everything else in my
> > application keys".
> > 
> > The rationale is I don't know which keys were deprecated 'n' versions
> > ago I don't know how polluted could be the user preferences between each
> > upgrade/install/deinstall. But, I do know what are the active current
> > keys and the previous versiones (which I'm deprecating with the new
> > version).
> 
> Insanity.  So I'll use a machine that has 2.20 installed, and
> since 2.20 no longer uses certain keys, it just drops the data
> from the keys from GConf.  And then I'll use another machine
> that still has 2.18, and its state is gone.

You are right.

> I mean, I understand that occasionally compatibility issues
> happen, but why would we intentionally set out to create them?

Because the key is not used anymore, or there was a typo in the previous
version, or the application got merged into another one, the keys were
sorted out different for any reason, etc.

I still have net-rhythmbox while I have rhythmbox, I also have
gnome_screenshot while I have gnome-screenshot, or /GNOME/Spell while
sometimes it will have /dektop/gnome/spell, or even I don't use the
spell anymore.

Those files are read and the keys are stored in memory while they are
useless.

The settings are getting bigger each time there is some kind of keys
reorganization.  The same sickness of Window's registry (even if I
dislike the comparison).

Regards,

-- 
Germán Poó-Caamaño
http://www.ubiobio.cl/~gpoo/
Concepción - Chile