Re: Module proposal: dconf

[Jamie McCracken <jamie mccrack googlemail com>]

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 11:48 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> 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.


The important thing is the ability of an admin to easily copy a branch
of config settings. Thats trivial in gconf and I use it for copying
settings between machines (cp ~/.gconf/blah)

So whats needed is perhaps some import/export branches of settings to
xml that would enable something similar

jamie