Hi Mark,
Please excuse my ignorance in this matter. This proposed changes
looks most significant when
the user work environments have not only multiple releases of GNOME and
also multiple vendors
releases of GNOME with shared home directory, so the configurations
made on one login sessions
will not be picked up by susbsequent sesssion on a different version of
the GNOME and via versa
I presume when the user's gconf now has %.gconf.tree.xml and
%.gconf.xml
Are the rationales listed at the end justified this change?
Or can this change is intended to facilitate merging of configuration
easier now that it is more structured etc?
I find the current rationales difficult to justify introducing another
level of complexity to user and system
admins, or is it just me :(
Help me out here please :)
-Ghee
Hey,
Well, no. I lie. But I got your attention :-)
If you care about GConf preferences being shareable between pre-2.6 and
2.8 (or later) logins - or if you think someone might shout at you if it
doesn't work - you need to read this email.
In GNOME 2.6 we introduced a feature into GConf's default backend
whereby you could tell it to save a part of the GConf tree to a single
file (%gconf-tree.xml) rather than to a file (%gconf.xml) in every
directory of that part of the tree. See:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gconf-list/2003-July/msg00001.html
And we had a huge thread on this list which was related, but I didn't
really understand what was going on there:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-October/thread.html#00084
Anyway, the plan now is that we're going to switch this feature on very
soon. See:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138498
The way its going to work is that, we have a hardcoded list of
directories and we will coalesce the contents of each of those
directories *sub-directories* when we next go to save a change. e.g. the
list contains "/apps", so the next time you change
/apps/metacity/general/theme you'll find a %gconf-tree.xml file in
~/.gconf/apps/metacity.
Effectively, this means that changes made to your preferences using
GNOME 2.8 will not be visible if you log back into GNOME 2.4 or earlier.
To disable this behaviour you can pass a "nomerge" flag to the backend
e.g. change
xml:readwrite:$(HOME)/.gconf
to
xml:readwrite,nomerge:$(HOME)/.gconf
I'll be committing the patch below as soon as I've given it a decent
hammering. Initial testing suggests its okay, however.
Rational for the change is twofold:
1) Lessen the pain of sharing a homedir between simultaneous logins by
saving apps configuration as atomic units. This then gives us the
same hypothetically-broken-but-usually-OK behaviour as regular dotfiles.
2) Performance improvements
Cheers,
Mark.
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