Re: GConf design goals.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

>So why is this important?  Because rich data types, while incredibly
>convenient to app developers (I recognise this, after all I am an app
>developer), are fatal to administrability.  Imagine you have connected
>to a box from a VT100 terminal, you have a bash prompt, and you need to
>fix a department's desktop settings.  How do you do it?

You use "vi".

Lets take an *actual* example of data stored by bonobo-conf (which is
a front-end to GConf, using the general CORBA-based API):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<gconf>
  <entry name="floattest" mtime="983416437" muser="miguel" type="float" value="12.8000001907349"/>
  <entry name="longtest" mtime="983416433" muser="miguel" type="int" value="19"/>
  <entry name="stringtest" mtime="983416441" muser="miguel" type="string">
    <stringvalue>This is a testt</stringvalue>
  </entry>
  <entry name="booltest" mtime="983416433" muser="miguel" type="bool" value="true"/>
  <entry name="enumtest" mtime="983416433" muser="miguel" type="string">
    <stringvalue>%CORBA:ANY%&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;?&gt;
&lt;any&gt;
  &lt;type name=&quot;StorageType&quot; repo_id=&quot;IDL:Bonobo/StorageType:1.0&quot; tckind=&quot;17&quot; length=&quot;0&quot; sub_parts=&quot;2&quot;&gt;
    &lt;subnames&gt;
      &lt;name&gt;STORAGE_TYPE_REGULAR&lt;/name&gt;
      &lt;name&gt;STORAGE_TYPE_DIRECTORY&lt;/name&gt;
    &lt;/subnames&gt;
  &lt;/type&gt;
  &lt;value&gt;0&lt;/value&gt;
&lt;/any&gt;
</stringvalue>
  </entry>
</gconf>

So which part exactly you think is impossible to edit with VI?

Best wishes,
Miguel.