Re: Module proposal: dconf [migration from gconf]

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 19:27 +0100, Iain wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote:
> 
> > For applications that need to do weird conversions where we can't extend
> > the tool to do this in a generic fashion we could just ship a special
> > tool with the application that links to gconf so that the normal app
> > doesn't have to link to gconf.
> 
> Surely that still creates an implicit dependancy on gconf though that
> we can't get rid of.
> 
> If the (hypothetical) gconf-migration-tool links to gconf and is run
> by every gnome3 package on install
> this means that every gnome3 package is going to depend on g-m-t,
> which is going to depend on gconf
> meaning that we still need to ship gconf (and orbit, and bonobo and
> bonobo-activation-thingy)
> so that people can build this g-m-t.
> 
> Would it not be better for gconf-migration-tool to be able to parse
> the gconf database without requiring gconf?
> That way someone would be able in the future to remove gconf, orbit
> etc and know that nothing will break.

In practice I'm sure everyone will keep shipping gconf for a while. So,
we could either keep the gconf requirement for a bunch of revisions and
then drop the migration code in the future.

Or we could do as you say and cut and paste the gconf code to the tool
so that it can read directly from the gconf data files.

Not sure which is best. From a pureness perspective it would be nice to
be able to build gnome 3.0 without having to build bonobo & co. From a
practical perspective i'm not sure it matters.