Re: Locking

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Julian,

On Wed, 2002-08-07 at 17:14, Julian King wrote:
> We are trying to get portions of GNOME running on machines with significantly
> non-standard filesystems.

	Sounds fun;

> 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.

	There should only ever be 1 gconfd per user, since there is only 1 set
of [otherwise unlocked] xml files that the gconfd works on. Thus if we
have 2 gconfd's around, they will fight over the files, not send
notifications for key changes performed by different gconfd, etc. [ and
a whole host of related problems ].

> Could someone confirm that this is the intent?

	Yes; it is.

> a) Select at compile time
> b) Select at run time via a configuration option
> c) Select at run time via a command line option

	Depends - b,c sound good, it might be nice to have a 'dotlocking'
command line option, that people can use if they are confidant that dot
locking is going to work on their system - which it probably won't.

	I think Havoc is just extremely cautious of adding locking mechanisms
which are known not to work in many scenarios, with which the user can
screw themselves without really knowing it ;-) but having an option for
a different locking approach sounds like a good compromise to me [ but
I'm not Havoc ].

> 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.

	Interesting; I'd be interested in chatting about what CUS' doing with
Gnome / Linux [ being somewhat local in Newmarket ].

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot