Re: hardcoded values in ~/.gconf

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 01:12:58AM +0100, Tony Houghton wrote: 
> What about all those muser="..." entries, or don't they matter?

They should not matter, no. That's intended to track who changed
something last, nothing else.

> OTOH I'm surprised you go so far as to say these are bugs. Is it wrong
> for configurations to no longer apply for a user with a different login
> and/or a different home path?

I think it's definitely a bug if a config hardcodes the home path.
Hardcoding the user is more debatable but probably still better to
avoid.

> The problem from the programmers' PoV is that you can't feed a filename
> beginning with "~", "$HOME", or containing other shell variables, into
> any old function and have it work. I'm fairly sure the lower level file
> handling functions like the ones in <stdio.h> and <fcntl.h> only work
> with expanded paths, and I doubt the GLib functions are any different.
> It's theoretically possible to make sure only relative paths are stored
> in config, but most things work with absolute paths (eg GTK/Gnome file
> selectors), and converting paths, while possible, is extra donkey work. 

Sure, of course. James suggested gconf_client_set_filename() that
would be used instead of gconf_client_set_string() and would
automatically handle this; I think that makes sense.

Still, the fact that the bug is currently annoying to fix doesn't make
it less buggy. ;-) 

Havoc