Re: Module proposal: dconf

[Sandy Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong gmail com>]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-10-13 at 13:34 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
>> I think it makes sense to do the migration for all the apps at once.
>> Also, the migration from gconf can be done directly from dconf, the
>> first time it starts, or even it could be clever enough to synchronize
>> changes from gconf every time it starts, to cover apps that migrate to
>> dconf later. That would remove the apps' responsibility to do the
>> migration, which would be a lot of code to have that in all
>> applications.
>
> I personally think migration is less critical than a lot of people
> think.
>
> Here's why (for me at least):
>
>  - I often reinstall my distro when the new release comes out

If it would help we could get numbers from distros on how many users
do upgrades vs clean installs.

Also keep in mind users with a separate /home partition who do clean
reinstalls but keep the same home directory.

I really hope that our general user experience is better than
"completely wipe and reinstall every [six] months", but I don't have
hard statistical data about what actually happens.

>  - GConf (and GSettings) are not used to store "important" things like
>    emails, bookmarks, contacts, cookies, passwords, ...

Let me take a quick look at what Tomboy stores:

* A bunch of metadata related to synchronization that, if lost,
requires you to "start over", which an upgrading user might find to be
a hassle
* Formatting/linking preferences
* List of "pinned" notes that always show up in tomboy tray menu
* Global keybindings
* Some keys used to determine if it's the first run

So we can see that in the case of the application I maintain, the user
would lose a few minutes fixing all of this.  In the case of pinned
notes, it could be a very frustrating thing since it's easy to forget
what you had pinned, and while you could argue that this should not be
stored in gconf, the fact of the matter is that right now it is.

>  - we're changing how our entire desktop looks/feels at the same time
>    anyway, so the user will need to reconfigure that stuff (if they
>    please)

I'm don't agree with this; how many of our user-facing applications
are making drastic changes for 2.30?  The only thing I can think of is
the gnome-shell migration.

>  - it never takes me more than a few minutes of fiddling to get stuff
>    back to "how i like it" in terms of settings.

As shown above, this is not true for every application.

If there are other applications in a similar situation to Tomboy,
these minutes add up.

>  - doing some sort of automated migration encourages application
>    developers to base their new settings schemas on the way they did
>    things with GConf, rather than giving them a chance to have a 'clean
>    break' and take full advantage of the new API (and also remove years
>    of cruft).

Good point.  I hadn't even considered this.  Could you please list the
new features we can use?  I did not see them in your original
proposal.

> It certainly makes sense to provide some mechanism for applications
> using GConf to continue to function (note: this mechanism might be
> "continue using GConf").  For applications that get ported, though,
> *shrug*.

As long as this is clearly communicated, it's not a big deal.  I will
not freak out if I have to do the migration myself, but I do think
it's worth looking into a mass migration.

> I'm open to disagreement on this point :)

Excellent ;-)

Sandy