Re: dconf

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

Ross Burton wrote:
> Is a GConf compatibility layer possible, or are there too many semantic
> differences?

The type system of dbus (and therefore GVariant and dconf) is a superset 
of the type system of GConf -- any value that can be stored in GConf can 
be stored in dconf.  Due to the simple nature of GConfValue, making this 
bridge would be trivial.

The namespace is also essentially the same: a hierarchy of keys with no 
particular restrictions.

It would be very easy to use dconf with the GConf API with a very thin 
client-side compatibility layer.

One thing that dconf is missing that GConf gives you, however, is 
schemas.  You could get this by using dconf as a backend from the gconf 
daemon.  It seems like this is sort of missing the point, though.

It might be possible to come up with a temporary hack to deal with 
schemas.  Something like having the compatibility layer insert responses 
 from the schema files where appropriate and dealing with dynamic 
application-installed schema entries (think: panel) with extra keys in 
the dconf database.

Like if you add a schema for some "foo" key maybe you could get a 
".foo.schema" extra entry that contains all of the information required...

This is honestly a problem space that I haven't spent too much time 
exploring, but there are certainly possibilities here.

Cheers