Life, the Universe and GConf

["M . Thielker" <balsa t-data com>]

Hi,

I think things got a bit confused here a while back - the described error is
caused by gtkhtml needing GConf, not Balsa needing it.
As complicated as I gather GConf is, I'm not in favor of moving Balsa to it
just yet. I, personally, like flat text config files, because I can go in
and change things by hand quite easily.
However, we also must start thinking about the future of Gnome and Balsa.
There will be a new generation of users, they will not be programmers, most
likely they wouldn't know how to set up and configure a Linux machine as we
do now.
They will be former Windows users who run a mostly automated setup program
to get a machine configured without actually knowing how it's done. They
don't care about text configuration files, either, because they wouldn't
know what to do with one if they knew were it was.
They want powerful applications that remember everything, just like they
have in Windows today. There is a huge amount of data that may need to be
stored on a per app basis, it may be too much for text files to handle
efficiently any more.
I still don't think that Gnome should adopt something akin to the Windows
Registry, that big heap of manure. After all, 80% of irrecoverable (by user
means) Windows bork-ups are caused by inconsistent data in the registry. A
solution must be found, but it can't be as space- and inode-wasting as GConf
seems to be. It also shouldn't be as opaque as the registry in Windows. I
believe that there will be major changes when GConf starts messing up, and
that Balsa should move there once the bugs are out.
However, we will have to mess with it, indirectly, because gtkhtml needs it.
We don't have to embrace it and conform to it, that's what I say.

Melanie