Sharing GConf keys

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>]

Hi Gnomes,
We where having a small discussion about shared GConf keys. One of the
neat things about GConf IMHO is that is has become easier/move practical
to share configuration settings between different applications in GNOME.

For instance we already provide a set of gconf keys that all the current
gstreamer based applications use for selecting audio sources and sinks,
and video sources and sinks. 

I noticed today that both monkey-media and gst-player used a cdrom key
set to '/dev/cdrom'. I figured that this key was widely needed/wanted
and we decided that we should probably move it to the gstreamer shared 
gconf keys.

Anyway I felt that non-gst based applications like gnome-cd player for
instance should also share this key with us at which point we had a
disagreement over if adding a dependency on gstreamer (to get a gconf
key) for a non-gstreamer application was a good idea (even if the
gnome-media package) depends on gstreamer.

Anyway I guess this is just one example of where we want GNOME apps to
share gconf keys, but this is hard without making one package depend
upon the other for the gconf key.

I figure that GConf allows for different schema files to set the same
gconf path (correct?) so I guess one solution is have all the apps that
need 'key x' set it. This solution feels a little dirty.

Another solution is to have some low level library, maybe even gconf
itself, add a set of commonly used gconf keys which all apps could then
use cause they can be sure that they are there.

The third option is saying that if you have GNOME 2.2 installed, you
will have GStreamer installed, so there is no problem adding a GStreamer
dependency in the form of using a gstreamer set GConf key also for apps
not using GStreamer. (Same argument would go for other similar
packages/keys in other parts of the desktop).

Opinions?

Christian


-- 
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>