Re: Module proposal: dconf

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 17:25 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 10:54 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 15:54 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > > Take 20,000 distro Gnome users, what percentage of them do you think have
> > > ever hand edited their configuration, what percentage do you think have
> > > ever used things like gconftool. For that matter what percentage of
> > > normal users do you think even understand the question "Have you ever
> > > hand edited your gconf database"
> > 
> > No doubt.  But ask that same question of sysadmins, and
> > you'll probably get a different answer.
> 
> if a system administrator is hand (or script) editing a file in .gconf
> then he or she is doing it wrong, as them kids say. the only tool that
> should be allowed to touch the gconf database is gconftool, not sed or
> vim.

Sysadmins frequently run into walls developers don't anticipate.
I could easily imagine a situation where mandatory settings are
being pushed to heterogeneous client machines, and where a script
generates certain values based on certain conditions.

> I perfectly agree in principle: we need tools for accessing the settings
> database. this issue is completely orthogonal to dconf, though, as dconf
> is just storage, not the API you use to access the configuration.

I understand that, but it only makes sense within the broader
context of us switching from GConf to GSettings, and all the
stuff that comes along.  Without access APIs, a storage system
is useless.

If we're not talking about using dconf for our configuration
system, and thus talking about our configuration system, then
there's really no reason to talk about dconf.

--
Shaun