Re: desktop schemas review [was: Re: GSettings migration status]

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 15:24 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> > A possible solution is to store paths under your home
> > directory as relative paths, and when reading, assume
> > any relative paths are relative to your home directory.
> > Doing this with each individual application would be
> > tiresome and error-prone, but it would be easy with
> > a convenience API like this.
> 
> The traditional Unix way to deal with such paths is to base them
> off an environment variable so
> 
> g_settings_set_relative_file(settings, key, envvar, path);
> 
> eg
> 
> g_settings_set_relative_file(settings, "mbox", "HOME", "mbox");
> 
> Then you have the fun that $HOME/mbox is a perfectly valid actual
> filename so you need to know what you are looking at, or store files in a
> smarter way.
> 
> Apple take this even further with removable media so that it knows about
> paths on a removable device by the device name and relative path.

GVfs metadata does something similar based on mount uuids etc. However,
doing something like that makes a simple "set a pathname setting"
operation into a possibly blocking (maybe hanging on NFS or suchlike)
operation, so it is not something to do lightly or automatically.


-- 
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 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
       alexl redhat com            alexander larsson gmail com 
He's an ungodly Catholic cowboy moving from town to town, helping folk in 
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