Re: migrating to new backend format

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Sun, 2003-10-05 at 21:55, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> If we use the patch to coalesce gconf XML files, then ~/.gconf will
> become unreadable to GNOME 2.4 and earlier. That's not allowed.
> 
> So we can create ~/.gconf26 or something (better name?). Given this
> there are these possible migration paths and maybe others:
> 
>  1. Have the gconf path contain ~/.gconf26 in front of ~/.gconf. 
>     In principle, this means that the two will be merged. Unsetting 
>     a setting should nuke the setting from both.
> 
>     Downsides: not well-tested, and creates a permanent efficiency 
>     hit as operations will always check with both backends.
>     Possible extreme weirdness if you log in to GNOME 2.4, change 
>     things in ~/.gconf only, then back into 2.6 and suddenly 
>     have both backends.
> 
>  2. Do a one-time migration (dump/load) from ~/.gconf into the 
>     new ~/.gconf26 (probably the trigger to the migration is that 
>     ~/.gconf exists and ~/.gconf26 doesn't).
> 
this seems like the best way. But one thing that could be interesting is
to synchronize 2.6's database with 2.4's. That is, when starting, it
could get the changes made since a given date (is that possible in
GConf?) and synchronize them with its database. Thus, if you ever start
a 2.4 session in-between 2.6 sessions, changes made in 2.4 will be
reflected in 2.6.

cheers