Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Hi Jamie,

Today at 19:53, jamie wrote:
>
> Okay but we still have the problem of saving non-Gconf data. Do we
> really want to have a host of different storage methods and repositories
> or do we want to standardise on one system that handles all our needs?

I believe we have that, and we call that a "file system".  Improving
filesystems in differing ways is already in progress, I just don't see
why it would a-priori have to be RDBMS based.  RDBMS are inherently
not friendly to hierarchical data, which filesystems are usually
optimized for. (Perhaps Object-oriented DBMSes are, but I don't know
much about them.)

If we were developing for Plan9, we wouldn't need to say anything
else at all, but since we're slowly diverging from "everything is a
file" to "everything is a file, but with some extra metadata" (then
again, if we had the ability to use things like GNU Hurd
"translators", this could be solved with the simple filesystem
interface like /path/to/file.xml/metadata, or similar), then we need
only worry about how to store the metadata.

There're many approaches to that problem, and not all of them use
a RDBMS.  Filesystems are currently most stable, have the best
performance, and best scalability when it comes to "data storage".
Most of network protocols which are not explicitely file and/or
filesystem based (like FTP or NFS) do not work with files, but rather
with "messages" (like HTTP or MIME, which provide a bunch of metadata 
along with data in each message), so there's no problem in
transferring metadata along with data itself across networks
(i.e. there you get your network transparency even for files and
metadata -- no need to think of anything else).

When we can optimaly present data in form of simplistic "relations"
(i.e. tables in a database), then we need to look up at RDBMS.  "Data
storage" doesn't mean relations by default.

Now, with our "data storage" problems resolved, lets move on :)

Cheers,
Danilo

PS. Sorry if I'm a bit agressive, but as they say: "I know RDBMS, OOP,
TCP/IP, LAN, MIME, FTP, HTTP and seventeen other technical/IT terms." :)