Re: migrating to new backend format

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 23:26, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 19:54, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > certainly not convenient, no.  if it's going to be one file per app,
> > then appname.xml or appname.gconf.xml would work perhaps?
> 
> That doesn't work because gconf has no knowledge of apps. It doesn't
> matter which app is reading or writing. The tree of values is global,
> like the filesystem.

ah, right.

> 
> It also doesn't work because you can have a directory named
> appname.gconf.xml, the whole point of the % is to avoid colliding with
> possible directory names.

right, wasn't sure that . was intentionally valid character for that.

> 
> > eek.  shouldn't we be defining what is valid vs. the other way around?
> 
> We're defining an ASCII subset. You can implement validation by checking
> those bytes that aren't allowed or those that are, you still get the
> same strings as valid/invalid.
> 
> If your point is that the ASCII subset should be different, it's too
> late to change that; it's in the ABI. GNOME 3 material.

understood.  just seems a bit dangerous, since there are quite a few
ascii characters which are probably a bad idea in gconf names, but if
its spec, guess theres no point in mentioning that.  ;-)

> 
> > what would be the chance of having the new gconf support both formats,
> > and use the old one if old style files are about, and the new one
> > otherwise?  users running older versions of gnome can just stick with
> > the one, older format, and users of nothing but newer can just use the
> > newer format.  (perhaps after a migration tool is run, if they had an
> > older version once.)
> 
> People are just going to use whatever we ship by default, it needs to
> work out of the box.

well, yes, that's my point.  If the old config files are there, just use
the old format.  users in the know could convert it with a migration
tool.  those who use both older and newer versions of gnome, or those
who don't know about or understand the issue, wouldn't run the migration
tool (in the later group of users, perhaps not even know about the
migration tool) just to be safe (since we can't know for sure if they
use both over a network or not).

> Havoc
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.