GConf and packaging

[Guillaume Assire <alphagolf altern org>]

Greetings,

I'm glad to see this list created. I have a couple of issues with GConf,
that I wanted to share with someone, but I didn't know who  ;-P

For the very few I know about GConf, it should behave as some kind of MS
Windows registry, with applications writing datas on it. At least that's
what I've read in the README, and I'd be happy to know a bit more about
it, that I will hopefully do while reading your messages.

My main problem with GConf, is that I create packages of all of what I
install, for internal use. Since I use GNOME on Red Hat Linux machines,
6.0 and 6.1, the package manager is of course RPM. When (re)building an
application, this tool installs it in a fake root as you might know,
somewhere in /var/tmp/foo-root. This allows to build apps as non-root,
and gives a clean result. And here's where GConf gives me headaches.

First of all, GConf doesn't make use of DESTDIR in all of its
subdirectories. This forced me to give a bunch of parameters to the make
install : prefix=$RPM_BUILD_ROOT`gnome-config --prefix` etc... So that
RPM effectively installs all of GConf in its fake root, rather than
failing with "permission denied" (since I'm not root).

Secondly, I then tried to build an RPM package for Eye Of Gnome (eog),
and it ended with :
GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=xml::/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults gconftool
--makefile-install-rule ./eog.schemas
Initializing XML backend module
Unloading XML backend module.
Failed to access configuration source(s): Couldn't resolve address for
configuration source:
 Can't read from or write to the XML root directory in the address
`xml::/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults'

If I try to rebuild the same package as root, of course it works. But it
modifies things in my own hard disk, which is actually what it is
designed for :
GCONF_CONFIG_SOURCE=xml::/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults gconftool
--makefile-install-rule ./eog.schemas
reload
Trying dir /usr/share/oaf
Initializing XML backend module
Acquired lock directory
`/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults/%gconf-xml-backend.lock'
Directory/file permissions for XML source at root
/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults are: 700/600
dir file /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults/apps/eog/view/%gconf.xml not
found
Creating new dir /apps/eog/view
Enter create_fs_dir: /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults/apps/eog/view
Parent dir is /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults/apps/eog

How could I prevent GConf to do so at build time, in the make install,
and execute this as a post-install script of RPM for instance ? I heard
you talking of the use of several databases (or maybe I'm wrong), that
would do the trick but how could I set that up ?

Thanks in advance,
-- 
Guillaume

# rm -rf *;o
o: command not found