Havoc, For the next release of Debian, codenamed Sarge, we (the GNOME Team) are making some changes to the stock GConf install. We thought we'd mail you about them to see if they all look sensible to you, and to see how many of these could be pushed into GNOME 2.8. Firstly, we've a patch to gconfd[1] so that we can send a HUP signal to force it to reload the configuration. This happens in the postinst script of any GConf-using package, and means the user doesn't have to kill gconfd before the schemas are applied (which is the cause of many bug reports). The alternative is to send a TERM signal, but this is rather evil. Next, we're taking the plunge and moving the .schemas files from /etc/gconf/schemas to /usr/share/gconf/schemas. Files in /etc are treated specially in Debian and dpkg will allow the user to keep the old schemas instead of installing the new files, which is confusing and can potentially break software. We're going to implement this by moving the schema files at package build-time. It would be great if this change was in GConf 2.8, as it should only need a patch to the AM_GCONF_SOURCE_2 autofoo snippet (and then becomes a packaging issue). Finally, we're going totally bonkers and relocating the installed defaults/mandatory keys from /etc/gconf/ to /var/lib/gconf/defaults[2], whilst keeping /etc/gconf/system.defaults for administrators to play with. The patches used to implement this are available online[3]. They appear to work and results in full FHS-compliant GConf behaviour (also a cause of several bug reports). So, do these changes look good, and is there any real reason why they cannot be integrated into GNOME 2.x? Jeff Waugh has stated that he doesn't see these as ABI-breaking patches to me, so can be in the 2.x release set. Thanks, Ross (on behalf of the GNOME Team) [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/2004/06/msg00186.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/2004/06/msg00195.html [3] http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org/debian/pool/g/gconf2/gconf2_2.6.1-4.diff.gz -- Ross Burton mail: ross burtonini com jabber: ross burtonini com www: http://www.burtonini.com./ PGP Fingerprint: 1A21 F5B0 D8D0 CFE3 81D4 E25A 2D09 E447 D0B4 33DF
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