Re: Module proposal: dconf

[Ghee Teo <Ghee Teo Sun COM>]

There are a number of difficulties if there is no proper migration of 
end users.
- users often  have forgotten the settings they made since they don't 
often upgrade their systems.
 (you as a developer is used to frequent update and things are 
generally fresh in memory, that makes it easier)
- If the system admin has to set it up again for the user manually that 
will be a lots of supports calls.
- Users do not get a good impression of the system should some important 
behavior changes without an easy fix.

Of course, migration tools are generally only useful for a short period 
of time. If we do not plan it well, it will be literally a wasted 
efforts. That is by the times the majority of users have gotten the poor 
'experience', they adjusted to it and moved on.

Still, do we want to risk the GNOME reputation against obviously some 
hard works ?
To probe a further further, are there measurable improvement in 
performance to switch from gconf to dconf/gsettings that can help us to 
justify the proposed changes [1]?

-Ghee
[1] I like to acknowledge that Ryan did some Great works here! Still 
these is a question I feel important to ask :)

Ryan Lortie 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
>
>   - GConf (and GSettings) are not used to store "important" things like
>     emails, bookmarks, contacts, cookies, passwords, ...
>
>   - 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)
>
>   - it never takes me more than a few minutes of fiddling to get stuff
>     back to "how i like it" in terms of settings.  
>
>   - 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).
>
> 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*.
>
> I'm open to disagreement on this point :)
>
> Cheers
>
> _______________________________________________
> desktop-devel-list mailing list
> desktop-devel-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
>