Re: [Evolution] system upgrade wierdness (lost settings)

[Mark Gordon <mtgordon ximian com>]

Trimming away some of the irrelevant bits of this conversation...

On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 17:24, guenther wrote:

> > Well, there isn't much that uses gnome-spell besides Evolution.  I can't
> > think of another application off the top of my head.
>
> Uh, not? Sorry, I just simply assumed, gnome-spell would be the standard
> component for all Gnome apps to spell check. What do those other apps
> use, then?

Evolution uses a component, i.e. another process that, in theory, can
handle spelling for multiple applications.  Doesn't seem to work that
way in practice.  Most other apps are using libraries directly rather
than the component.

> I like to tweak and optimize things, that are more under the hood and
> not visible to the user. Having a GUI for that is good -- but having no
> choice besides the GUI is not the traditional UNIX/Linux way.

There is a command-line interface: gconftool (which now comes in
gconftool-1 and gconftool-2 flavors).  Useful for scripting, e.g. in
package postinstalls.  Arguably superior in that regard to scriptable
text editing, e.g. sed.

> FWIW: I think I can deal with a centralized configuration. At least it
> is done by hackers, that sure wanna even more control than I want. And i
> doubt, we will end up with such a mess like the MS registry...

Notable advantages of GConf over the MS registry:

- It's entirely user-level; no machine-level settings stored in GConf.
- That being the case, problems won't prevent the machine from booting
and shouldn't even prevent you from loggin in, assuming you have a "safe
mode" alternative to GNOME, e.g. the console, remote login, or vanilla
X.

-Mark Gordon