Some GConf comments and questions

[Patrick <pabos glypsube org>]

Hi.
I recently started a new application and immediately set out to figure
out how GConf fits into the whole configuration scheme. It looks quite
promising from what I've read. In the process of exploring the scattered
documentation available on the subject some questions, comments and
suggestions came to mind. I've written them all down here so I don't
forget them and for comment. This seems to be a relatively low volume
mailing list so I'm hoping this is acceptable. Not all of this is a
GConf problem but it should all pertain to GConf.


(-) libgda is currently /apps. Should this go under some equivalent of
/libs or some equivalent. Isn't it, and other libraries like it (ie.
gstreamer) part of the Gnome desktop environment itself rather than an
application on it (although perhaps not officially yet)? At minimum, it
seems that it would make more sense to separate libs from apps if only
to break up long lists in the tree more and separate framework and
applications.

(-) I don't see any evidence of versioning of configuration data by any
application. This seems like poor planning for the future. Should there
be extended GConf schema guidelines for things like this?

(-) I don't see any structure inherent to GConf for separating out areas
of configuration - ie. system-wide preferences, preferences inherently
dependent on a particular computer, preferences shared between groups of
users, user settings, or different configuration sets per user

(-) My impression from some of the documentation is that GConf is 
intended for preferences and not configurations. This seems like it will
limit usefulness in a distributed environment since configuration of an
application for a user on some other machine will likely require more
than just preferences to be available for use. This is related to the
previous point as well since configuration/preferences would require
more structure separating their function, scope and range.

(-) I read a post very recently somewhere which mentioned that changing
sounds in various media applications was not reflected in other media
applications. This seems like an ideal situation for GConf - ie. a
global volume setting, or all of the mixer settings ... but is that a
preference or a setting dependent on the hardware you are using? ie. the
change notification is good but are all settings in GConf assumed to be
system wide?

(-) Initially after reading the GConf documentation I wanted to write a
PostgreSQL backend. Then reading some more I was planning to write an
ACAP backend, since I still liked the idea. But after reading Havoc's
paper available given at a large conference in Ottawa (I don't have the
link anymore just the file). which described GConf and mentioned plans
for phase II and quickly skimming through the ACAP documentation, I am
interested to work on a new solution which takes the good ideas of ACAP
but works towards a smoother integration and feature set for GConf. In
short, I'm interesting in working on GConf phase II. Have any other
plans developed since the Ottawa paper? What are the latest plans?


Patrick