GConf port to DBus

[Ross Burton <ross burtonini com>]

Hi,

As you may be aware (for most people, probably not) there has been a
long-standing branch of GConf to DBus.  CodeFactory did the initial
port back in the DBus 0.x days for Maemo and more recently we've
(Intel) have been rebasing and enhancing it for MeeGo.  Rob Bradford
and myself have just finished rebasing it against GConf master and
bravely pushed it to a branch (port-to-dbus) at git.gnome.org.  Our
proposal is that the branch is merged into GConf master.

(At this point you could say "why bother? GConf is dead".  For the
GNOME Platform that's a worthy goal, and it might even happen in 3.2.
But the larger ecosystem isn't going to be as quick to switch to
GSettings as this, so GConf is going to hang around for quite some
time.  Merging this branch means that for the typical GNOME 3 desktop
there is no more ORBit involved, hurray!)

The ORBit support is still present and active by default.  To use DBus
IPC pass --disable-orbit.  I'll admit that the DBus port is rather
archaic, using raw libdbus instead of anything modern like dbus-glib
or (gasp!) GDBus. The core code hasn't changed much since the last
DBus API break, but it does work as we've been shipping it in Moblin
2/MeeGo onwards (and Nokia have been shipping something in all Maemo
releases).  Whilst I think that spending the time to merge this branch
is worth the effort, I don't think porting it to GDBus would be an
effective use of time.

The big question is who is willing to review the branch...  GConf
doesn't have any real maintainers any more.  Various respected people
in the community have been involved in this fork and it's been around
for a fairly long time so it's not entirely crazy, but still...  What
we do have in our favour is that the DBus support is optional and
disabled by default.

Any comments?

Ross