Module proposal: dconf

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

Hello

dconf is a very conceptually simple key/value storage system with an
implementation that makes it extremely efficient.  There have been 3
tarball releases so far: 0.1, 0.1.1, 0.2.  More will be following in the
coming weeks and months.


I'd like to propose the inclusion of dconf for GNOME 2.30 in the desktop
release set.


dconf brings in no new external dependencies [except, see below about
glib].  There is also a separate module, 'dconf-editor', however, that
uses Vala.  I have already proposed Vala as an external dependency for
2.30 in a separate mail -- I think the recent advances in the stability
of that project make this an extremely reasonable thing to do (even
regardless of dconf).

dconf is available for download from download.gnome.org, has its main
webpage on live.gnome.org, is under version control in git.gnome.org,
uses bugzilla.gnome.org for bug tracking and will soon have its gtk-doc
published at library.gnome.org.  This email is inspired by
vuntz gnome org 

Adoption is not wide among GNOME projects at this point, but hopefully
that changes soon.  There is also not very much community involvement at
this point aside from a somewhat successful Summer of Code project.  All
development, however, has been openly discussed and done entirely in the
open from the beginning.

dconf is very "GNOME 3.0 ready".  Not only does it avoid the use of
deprecated libraries -- it removes a big one; gconf using ORBit.

The license is LGPL 2.1 "or later" for libraries and binaries (since you
never know when code from a binary will want to make its way into a
library).

The main technical blocker on the inclusion of dconf is that it relies
on a branch of glib that has not yet been merged to master.  We have had
a discussion at Boston Summit two days ago between myself, Matthias
Clasen and David Zeuthen and we have agreed on the "way forward" for
dealing with all of the GVariant/DBus related issues in GLib that
involves the merging of the required patches to glib.  Hopefully this
happens in the coming weeks.

Thanks for the consideration


Cheers