Re: Module proposal: dconf

[Jamie McCracken <jamie mccrack googlemail com>]

There has to be migration - i can never remember all my evo account
settings and im sure in corporate environments  it would be a major
source of technical call outs

If it were for only Gnome 3 then maybe an exception can be made but for
gnome 2.x, migration is critical IMO

jamie

On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 16:14 +0100, Ghee Teo wrote:
> There are a number of difficulties if there is no proper migration of 
> end users.
> - users often  have forgotten the settings they made since they don't 
> often upgrade their systems.
>   (you as a developer is used to frequent update and things are 
> generally fresh in memory, that makes it easier)
> - If the system admin has to set it up again for the user manually that 
> will be a lots of supports calls.
> - Users do not get a good impression of the system should some important 
> behavior changes without an easy fix.
> 
> Of course, migration tools are generally only useful for a short period 
> of time. If we do not plan it well, it will be literally a wasted 
> efforts. That is by the times the majority of users have gotten the poor 
> 'experience', they adjusted to it and moved on.
> 
> Still, do we want to risk the GNOME reputation against obviously some 
> hard works ?
> To probe a further further, are there measurable improvement in 
> performance to switch from gconf to dconf/gsettings that can help us to 
> justify the proposed changes [1]?
> 
> -Ghee
> [1] I like to acknowledge that Ryan did some Great works here! Still 
> these is a question I feel important to ask :)
> 
> Ryan Lortie wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-10-13 at 13:34 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> >   
> >> I think it makes sense to do the migration for all the apps at once.
> >> Also, the migration from gconf can be done directly from dconf, the
> >> first time it starts, or even it could be clever enough to synchronize
> >> changes from gconf every time it starts, to cover apps that migrate to
> >> dconf later. That would remove the apps' responsibility to do the
> >> migration, which would be a lot of code to have that in all
> >> applications. 
> >>     
> >
> > I personally think migration is less critical than a lot of people
> > think.
> >
> > Here's why (for me at least):
> >
> >   - I often reinstall my distro when the new release comes out
> >
> >   - GConf (and GSettings) are not used to store "important" things like
> >     emails, bookmarks, contacts, cookies, passwords, ...
> >
> >   - we're changing how our entire desktop looks/feels at the same time
> >     anyway, so the user will need to reconfigure that stuff (if they
> >     please)
> >
> >   - it never takes me more than a few minutes of fiddling to get stuff
> >     back to "how i like it" in terms of settings.  
> >
> >   - doing some sort of automated migration encourages application
> >     developers to base their new settings schemas on the way they did
> >     things with GConf, rather than giving them a chance to have a 'clean
> >     break' and take full advantage of the new API (and also remove years
> >     of cruft).
> >
> > It certainly makes sense to provide some mechanism for applications
> > using GConf to continue to function (note: this mechanism might be
> > "continue using GConf").  For applications that get ported, though,
> > *shrug*.
> >
> > I'm open to disagreement on this point :)
> >
> > Cheers
> >
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> >   
> 
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