Galeon gconf port - problems we are facing

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco it gnome org>]

First of all I have to say gconf is a great piece of code, it solved a
lot of problems we had with gnome_config.

Now let's talk about the low side ;)), I hope it will help.
- Users have a lot of problems getting gconf configuration right. This
is
 partially due to the lack of good gconf packages, this is going to be
addressed by ximian, and it's alredy solved in Mandrake and Redhat
(rawhide). But the problem will still exist for users that compile from
sources. There are a lot of users compiling gconf from sources, and I
verified it's a real pain to setup the gconf source correctly. This is
partially due to the lack of documentation, partially to the fact it's
an unusual task. They are used to just type make install and have all
correctly setup. You could check galeon-user archives to see how people
react to these issues :) Or just join #galeon. We are passing most of
our time supporting users to install gconf.
I really think a default backend configuration should be created on make
install and set up properly. I dont see anything wrong with this.
It's really really bad to see people pissed by gconf (and stopping to
use or upgrade galeon) because of these problems when you know that once
everything is configured properly, it works great !!!
- Having to use --sysconfdir makes it harder to compile applications
using gconf. This has already been discussed and a good solution has
been suggested by Havoc. I tried to implement it, but I guess I failed
(no feedback) :(
I'm really sorry about it, I still hope someone will find the time to do
it correctly !
- This is more like a bug report. Many people (not me), well something
like 50% of people I talked about, are noticing prefs lossage after
using galeon for some time. The prefs just go back to default. We are
totally unable to track it.
All that I can say is that it's probably started when we began to use
notifiers, and that it seems to happen frequently when installing galeon
(so when installing the schema), and when crashing.
I would really be happy if someone had an idea on what can be cause
this. We checked our code carefully and all seems to be right. May this
be a gconf problem ? Or is it our fault (more likely :)?

It would be really good to fix some of these problems for gnome 1.4.1.

Thanks !

Marco