Re: dconf

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> Another question that I'm curious about is, how hard would it be to
> implement configuration snapshots?
>
> I think it would be quite useful to be able to make snapshots of the
> configuration for failsafe sessions or plain backup/rollbacks.
>
> Is this something that would require big changes on the current
> dconf's architecture/roadmap?

The single backend database file is maintained in such a way that it's 
always completely safe to make a copy of it and have the latest contents 
of the database.

It would also be possible to make a very slight modification to the code 
that causes every single write to the database to create a new tree (git 
style) and store all of the old copies of the tree.  This is close to 
how it already works, except currently there's an optimisation that 
allows directories to be reused if they can be atomically updated (ie: 
only one word-sized value needs to be changed).

Some mix could be possible: only write the totally new copies of the 
tree sometimes (every nth write, or once a day?).

Did you have something more specific/better in mind?

Cheers