Re: GConf design goals.

[Dietmar Maurer <dietmar ximian com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Dietmar Maurer <dietmar ximian com> writes:
> > Another handy CORBA_any feature are type aliases. A type alias is simply
> > another name for a type, nothing more. This is quite useful since it gives
> > you some more info about the type. For example:
> >
> > typedef string ContentType;
> >
> > which defines ContentType to be string. An generic editor can use this meta
> > info to
> > provide specialized editing features (maybe provide a list of mime types).
> >
>
> It wouldn't be a generic editor if it contained:
>
>  if (typename == "ContentType")
>     display_list_of_mime_types();
>
> if would be an editor with special-case knowledge of this config
> setting. ;-)

We have something like a plugin system for editors in bonobo-conf, so that you
can register editor widgets for specific types. This way it is possible to write
a "generic" configuration editor which can edit registered types with highly
specialized editors.

- Dietmar