GSettings migration status

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

Hi everyone,

I recently edited the TwoPointThirtyone wiki page, removing these
no-longer-true items from the "high risk" section:

 * GSettings/dconf: [[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=600271|
   GVariant]] and GSettings merge completely '''blocks''' porting apps
   from gconf to [[http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/GSettingsMigration|
   GSettings/dconf]].

 * GSettings/dconf: User settings migration from gconf to
   GSettings/dconf unclear

 * GSettings/dconf: Missing gconf to
   [[http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/GSettingsMigration|
   GSettings/dconf]] porting documentation for module maintainers


GVariant is merged.  GSettings is merged.  dconf is making regular
unstable-series releases along-side glib unstable releases (usually at
almost exactly the same time).

User settings migration is handled by the gsettings-data-convert(1) tool
included in GConf.

All that (and more) is documented in the GConf-to-GSettings migration
documentation here:
 http://library.gnome.org/devel/gio/unstable/ch27.html

One sore spot remaining is the lack of support for GVariant in language
bindings -- but that need not affect simple uses of GSettings (since
there are easily-bound convenience accessors for common types).

According to http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointThirtyone the schedule as of
June 28 says that we should have no fewer than 20 modules depending on
GConf.  http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/GSettingsMigration indicates
that we are quite behind on this goal.  55 modules in 'desktop' are
marked as 'to do' or various states of in-progress (the vast majority
are flatly 'to do').

To be clear:

GVariant and GSettings are totally ready for application author
consumption at this point -- at least from C, but also from other
languages for uses that don't involve complicated types.  You should be
using dconf as your backend, which is also working in its role as a
GSettings backend.

Please port your modules!


Thanks :)