Re: GConf editor tool

["Tomas O'Connor" <Tomas Oconnor Sun COM>]

Hi Erik,

>> > There's a gconf-editor module in CVS with a start on this by Tomas and
>> > Colm, but I think there's a lot of work to be done. (I mean a toplevel
>> > gconf-editor module, not the subdirectory that is or used to be in
>> > GConf itself.)
>> 
>> I did some early GUI prototypes (just mockups, no code) for this a few
>> months ago-- although I'm not sure which of these Tomas ended up basing
>> his prototype on because I haven't seen it yet!
>> 
>> Anyway, you can see my prototypes at
>> http://canvas.gnome.org/~gman/GConf/index.html -- for my money, #5 and
>> #6 have the most potential to be workable designs, but they all have
>> usability problems of one kind or another so more thought is certainly
>> required.
>> 

We'd definitely appreciate any input you have to offer on the gconf-editor. I 
based the GUI on Calum's prototypes, although in the interests of getting a 
basic prototype completed I didn't implement some of the more advanced features, 
like the Details button which would allow you to expand/collapse the main window 
to show details about a particular key or schema (I actually tried to implement 
it but the box packing was frying my brain so I gave up :))

At the moment you can browse the default gconf database and add, delete and edit 
keys. Colm Smyth wrote the C++ classes which the GUI uses to interact with the 
gconf api, it simplified maintaining the state of keys being edited greatly. 
They still need some work also, eg. handling notifications from gconfd.

There's lots of other features that could be added, searching, copying, better 
presentation of key values, applying schemas to keys etc. etc. etc. I haven't 
looked at porting to gtk 2.0 yet, I might wait until gtk is more stable for 
that.

Tom