Locking

[Julian King <jpk28 cus cam ac uk>]

Hi,

We are trying to get portions of GNOME running on machines with significantly
non-standard filesystems.

In particular we don't have hard links (and are unlikely to be able to
pretend to any time soon) and we do not have standard Unix-style locks
(although this we may do soon).

We have established _what_ the locking routines in gconfd do, but we
aren't sure as to _why_ they are doing quite that.  So rather than assume
that we are right it seemed much safer to ask someone.  I've chosen you
lot.  :-)

In particular we believe that (and the documentation hints strongly that 
this is the case) there should only ever be one gconfd, and that all file
manipulation on locked files should be done through this one instance of 
gconfd.

Could someone confirm that this is the intent?

Next, we are lazy people at heart, and have little or no desire to maintain
patches against an evolving code base, so assuming we can come up with a
modification for our filesystem which matches the requirements of the 
locking needed, what system for selecting this locking do the maintainers
of gconf recommend - and thus improve our chances of you adopting any
change we make?  Methods that spring to mind are:

a) Select at compile time
b) Select at run time via a configuration option
c) Select at run time via a command line option
d) (b) and (c) both options
e) Something else I've not thought of.

Any and all thoughts welcome.

Cheers,

Julian

P.S.  For those that are curious the filesystem is on a Novell server
and we are using ncpfs which we are mangling over time to improve as
well.