Re: remote configuration sources

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

"Kenneth Lierman Jr." <kliermanm bigfoot com> writes:
> Thanks for the info.
> 
> Just a little background on why i ask.... i'm trying to see if gnome
> currently (or could easily add) supports my biggest computing annoyance
> right now; that i have to maintain my address book, bookmarks, and other
> similar data both at work and at home, even though i run gnome in both
> places.... 
> 
> GConf with a remote backend seems to be close to a solution, but as far as
> i can tell it isn't really designed for the type of data i'm talking
> about.  It seems like some other combination of gnome-vfs and a GConf like
> thing (with caching, change notification, etc) is really needed.

I think ACAP is what you want to use. Check out the RFC on ACAP.

Had an idle-speculation conversation with Syd from the Mozilla project
on IRC the other day, he was thinking of adding this for Mozilla. 

I have some thoughts of reworking GConf so that the daemon is
basically an ACAP server (with extensions for schemas and
administrability), while the client-side API would remain pretty
similar to what it is now. This would replace the custom CORBA
protocol, and mean that e.g. Mozilla could talk to the GConf server,
even without using the GConf client-side API. Also it would add some
cool features such as those you mention. However, I am not going to
have time to implement this in any interestingly-near timeframe.

Even once you get ACAP working, I think the challenge remains to
create a standard spec for what an address book looks like inside
ACAP, if you want to share it among apps. Maybe this exists, I don't
know.

Anyhow, I think once GNOME apps are using the abstract GConf
client-side API, then we can rearrange the backend and get a lot of
instant benefit from doing so.

Havoc