Re: GNOME Settings vs. Application Specific Settings

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-10-06 at 23:12, Erick Woods wrote:
> I am working with Kyle Davis on Velocity, a file manager for GNOME.  We are
> running into things which are currently Nautilus specific and would be
> better if moved to a more neutral corner of gconf.  The the following define
> found in capplets/font/main.c is the current issue.
> #define DESKTOP_FONT_KEY  "/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_font"
> 
> Can that be relocated to a better spot?  Perhaps:
> "/desktop/gnome/interface/desktop_font_name"
> Several people need to be involved in this, so here it is.  It really should
> be a GNOME key and not a Nautilus key.  I am also finding several areas
> where there are Nautilus specific calls - should a file manager agnostic way
> of doing things be worked out?  In the long run, it would be nice to not
> have control center dependant on Nautilus - in the near future we hope to
> find that Velocity meets all the needs of the users who choose it and having
> another file manager lying around doesn't make sense.

The more keys we change, the more problems we create for users that use
different gnome versions sharing the same homedir, and the higher
chances are that we introduce bugs in the handling of settings. And this
risk is done for something that users of the standard Gnome desktop
(which include Nautilus) won't even notice.

I agree that this key and perhaps a few other could have a better
placement, but I'm not sure that actually moving them is worth it. We
could instead just move the key to a libgnome schema, and you'd have to
use /apps/nautilus/ in velocity. This would be slightly ugly, but not
horribly so, and there wouldn't be any problems for users.

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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's an all-American skateboarding dog-catcher on a search for his missing 
sister. She's a transdimensional French-Canadian snake charmer with someone 
else's memories. They fight crime!