Re: dconf

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

I think dconf is a great project, but I do have one question.  Will the
new dconf address the sorts of D-Bus problems raised in these GConf
bugs?

  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555745
  http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17970

Thanks,

Brian


On 04/02/09 10:37, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> Hello, d-d-l.
>
> I'm a long-time listener, first time caller.
>
> Many of you are probably aware of two things about me:
>
> 0) I'm that guy who is working on that weird cloud of dbus-ish stuff
> involving GVariant and dconf and GSettings, etc.
> 1) A few months ago I started working for Codethink
>
> This email is a statement of status, of direction and of intention. A
> lot of people have been asking what is going on, so this is an update.
> It's not really an attempt to start a discussion, but if that happens,
> then I'm happy to answer any questions. :)
>
>
> first: GVariant.
>
> GVariant has been in an essentially-complete state for quite a long time
> now. I recently rolled a tarball of it and announced it to the
> announcement list. It is available here:
>
> http://www.gnome.org/~ryanl/src/
>
> GVariant is currently hosted as a totally separate project in a git
> repository on git.desrt.ca:
>
> https://desrt.ca/gitweb/?p=gvariant
>
> The intention is that it be merged with glib (into the base libglib
> library). Now that glib is in git I will be making a branch and
> performing the merge. This should be complete within a couple of days. I
> will then propose it for inclusion in the next release of glib.
>
> GVariant is reasonably well-tested and is being used in a number of
> other projects that I'm working on. Of course, it surely has some bugs
> hiding in it. I believe that the API is more or less stable at this
> point, but I welcome constructive criticism and feedback. There are
> plans to add more functionality (such as the ability to print/parse
> pythonic text strings).
>
> You can read more details about how GVariant works in the release
> announcement here:
>
>
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2009-March/msg00103.html
>
>
> second: dconf and GSettings
>
> For some time I've been talking about these pair of projects as a
> proposed replacement for GConf. The reasons that we might want to
> replace GConf are well understood and widely documented and I won't talk
> about them here.
>
> A while ago there was even a reasonably-working implementation of dconf.
> This was based on a different value system (ie: before I started writing
> the more-generally-useful GVariant). I stopped working on dconf when I
> shifted focus to GVariant and when school started consuming a lot of my
> time.
>
> Recently, sponsored by Codethink (now my employer), I have resumed work
> on dconf. This has come in the form of a total rewrite (and
> simplification) based on GVariant. This rewrite (along with another
> project, GBus) is doing a lot to convince me of the stability and
> usability of GVariant.
>
> Briefly, dconf is a simple untyped hierarchy of keys. It is used as the
> backend storage for GSettings which is a very strictly typed high-level
> settings system intended to be used by GNOME applications. The API is
> much nicer than GConf.
>
> dconf is very efficient. The majority case in accessing settings is
> reading (think about desktop login: 1000s of settings read, none
> written). Reading in dconf is done directly from a memory-mapped file
> containing the settings in an efficient tree format and doesn't require
> an extra service to be running. The service is only needed for writes.
> Communication occurs over DBus, of course. :)
>
> The rewrite of dconf is currently extremely unstable and incomplete, but
> it is currently being hacked on (along with GSettings) full-time.
> Progress is good. In a week or two I will have something to show for
> this and I intend to have a stable release to go along with 2.28. Stay
> tuned. :)
>
> Ideally, I'd like to see GNOME using GSettings for 3.0. Rob Taylor (my
> boss) has indicated that I will definitely be able to spend time
> addressing issues that may arise with dconf and GSettings in the lead-up
> to 3.0.
>
>
> So that's it. That's what I'm up to.
>
> Have a good day :)
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