Re: Module proposal: dconf

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

On 10/14/2009 05:24 AM, Matěj Cepl wrote:
> Dne 13.10.2009 22:42, Dan Winship napsal(a):
>> OMG ITS TEH WINDOWS REGISTRY!!!1!1II|! IF ANY APP WRITES A SINGLE BYTE
>> WRONG THEN ALL OF YOUR APPS WILL BREAK AND YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO LOG IN
>> ANY MORE 
> 
> +1 :)
> 
> People who are not able to learn from history are doomed to live through
> it again.

Sorry, I thought the silliness made it clear that I was not actually
making that complaint, I was just saying that we know other people are
going to[1] so we should have the answer ready in advance so people can
point to it right away rather than letting the flame wars fester.

The problem is that most people (including me, and probably most of the
rest of this list, and certainly most of the people who will be flaming
about this) know absolutely nothing about the Windows registry other
than (a) it's binary, (b) sometimes it completely breaks your machine,
and (c) it's very trendy to hate on. So it's hard to argue that dconf
doesn't have the same problems, since I don't know what the Registry's
problems are.

OTOH, knowing some things about dconf, I can at least say that there are
two obvious mistakes in my rant above: apps don't write directly to the
database, only dconfd does, so a stupid app can't cause bad bytes to be
written. And even if the registry completely broke, then apps using
GSettings would just receive the default values (from the schemas, which
are not stored in the dconf database) rather than the previously-stored
values, so the absolute worst case is "everything reverts back to
defaults", not "you can't log in".

> http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html

No. That's about switching from a well-designed binary format to a
badly-designed binary format.

Likewise, using SQLite as someone else suggested (and as will almost
certainly be suggested again) does not actually help, because SQLite is
also a binary format, and therefore just as theoretically fragile.

-- Dan

[1]
http://linux-wizard.net/blog-dconf_in_gnome_30__one_step_further_to_windows_registry-271.html