gconf versioning

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 20:03 -0600, Brian Cameron wrote:
>  We are hoping to start work to ensure that GConf
> keys behave sanely when a user tends to run multiple versions of GNOME
> from the same home directory.

This is basically a QA problem, not an architecture problem, fwiw. To
solve it once and for all we need a spot in the release plan for each 6-
month cycle that says "test and fix multi-version login" and someone has
to do it.

e.g. the big problem between old and new panel was discovered in 1 day
of testing and fixed in 1 or 2 days of hacking:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-November/msg00318.html

But nobody had actually _done_ that work in the last 18 months, so it's
been broken forever.

Sometimes we catch this problem before we ship:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-November/msg00356.html

But on the whole, *someone* is going to screw it up in every release.
We need to QA that. It does not have to be hard.

There are architecture things we could do in theory (we could make
schemas more detailed and then autoversion when they change, or
something); there are also test suites we could write (these suites
could be driven by more detailed schemas, or we could just do a
gconftool-2 --break-key run to be sure the desktop can't get terminally
confused by bad config). 

But even with those, the QA-and-fix step is needed. So, let's be
generous and say we need 1 person-week of work per release to solve this
problem; who is going to volunteer it? ;-)

And should we put a note in the release schedule that we should test
this at some certain time (right before/after config key freeze?) ...

Havoc