Re: proposed architecture evolutions for GConf

[Joe Baker <joebaker nelfc com>]

Davyd Madeley wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-11-11 at 12:02 +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>
>   
> > There are several ways to deal with a single-session, single-host
> > configuration engine. Real problems arise when the user can log in
> > several times on different machines, with a shared filesystem. With the
> > number of corporate users working over NFS, this is not something we can
> > ignore.
> >     
>
> It is possible to write alternative GConf backends. I recall that Sun
> have written one that uses LDAP, its name starts with an A, but I can't
> recall what it is.
>
> Would this solve your problem?
>
>   
An example of the model of communications needed is the IMAP IDLE 
protocol.  Clients have the connection opened up and the server polls 
the client when there are changes to the mailstore that they should be 
aware of.  Multiple email clients can be monitoring the same folder at 
the same time.  SSL or TLS sockets encapsulation provide encrypted 
communications and an authentication layer is used as well.  The 
XAuthority token could be used as authentication token.  I am suggesting 
that Gconfd clients need to be able to connect to a Gconfd server via 
tcp to a remote socket:port. 

Perhaps Gconfd should evolve to host multiple users on the same socket 
much like an IMAP server does.  Consider offering a list of servers 
which could offer failover communications much like a secondary ldap server.


> --d
>
>