Re: Galeon gconf port - problems we are facing

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Marco Pesenti Gritti <marco it gnome org> writes:
> Now let's talk about the low side ;)), I hope it will help.

Definitely.

> - 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 !!!

Point taken. I guess it makes sense to fix make install to get this
right. I'd take a patch to do that.

> - 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 !

I think I've responded to all patches on this list???
If not, please point it out to me if you have stuff pending.

Anyhow, I'm not sure what you mean by "having to use --sysconfdir" -
can you explain more?

> - 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 :)?

I don't know of such a problem; I wouldn't expect it to happen really,
but I suppose it could.

One thing to investigate, a system where it's occurred, is the
contents of ~/.gconf after prefs are lost. Have the files been messed
up, or is there just some other confusion?

Ideally we could get some way for me to reproduce this, then I can fix
it quickly.

Havoc