Re: GConf and bonobo-conf

[Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth ireland sun com>]

Miguel,

>   You seem to be forgetting that you *still* have to tell users of
>GConf that they should only use it when the underlying data types are
>*never* going to change.

Not at all. Think about this; a structure (by definition) is more
likely to cause application breakage because it is more likely to
evolve. An application would be no longer able to read the structure
automatically using the CORBA_Any interface if:

- any data member changes
- a member is added or deleted
- members are re-ordered

An atomic configuration item is far less likely to change, so it
represents a more robust interface to a piece of configuration data.

Colm.

>Delivered-To: gconf-list gnome org
>To: Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth ireland sun com>
>Cc: michael ximian com, dietmar maurer-it com, hp redhat com, 
gconf-list gnome org
>Subject: Re: GConf and bonobo-conf
>From: Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>
>X-BeenThere: gconf-list gnome org
>X-Loop: gconf-list gnome org
>X-Mailman-Version: 2.0beta5
>List-Id: Discussion of the GConf library <gconf-list.gnome.org>
>
>
>> Michael, I'm really on your side; I would love to be able to easily
>> store rich data in GNOME's configuration system, but there is a
>> mis-match in the data model. If we add the bonobo-conf feature to
>> GConf, it becomes very difficult to persuade developers that they
>> should only use it for configuration data structures that will not
>> change (because handling multiple versions of the data is hard).
>
>Colm, 
>
>   You seem to be forgetting that you *still* have to tell users of
>GConf that they should only use it when the underlying data types are
>*never* going to change.
>
>   The fact that we are promoting CORBA_Any is a completely
>independent issue of the fact that changes in the formal "interface"
>of the stored data should be dealt with with a versioning model.
>
>   *All* of your comments dealing with changes to CORBA_any apply as
>well to *any* use of GConf's keys and data contents.
>
>Miguel.
>
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