Re: GConf in Debian Sarge

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 04:27, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> 
> > Needs to just write to a pipe or something to wake up the mainloop and
> > do the reload there... I'm trying to think of a program with an example
> > of this, dbus-daemon does it but that doesn't use GMainLoop.
> 
> An example would be appreciated.

I can give you the basic idea anyway:

 - on startup, create a pipe
 - on the read end of the pipe, set up a GLib main loop IO watch
 - in the signal handler, write one byte to the pipe
 - in the IO watch handler, read one byte, then reload the 
   configuration; or to be extra cool, queue an idle that reloads
   the configuration, which will help compress multiple reload requests

> > Factory defaults should be changed in packages by patching the .schemas
> > file.
> 
> I've already been told not to do that, but that's what Debian are
> usually doing. However, if the system administrator wants to change
> these defaults, he has to run gconftool again.

Right, but the sysadmin will be modifying local configuration, local
configuration goes in /etc

> Furthermore, the defaults are generated automatically by gconftool from
> the schemas, and this generation takes place in /etc, which is very bad.
> This has to go to /var/lib.

Maybe an additional schemas-only source could go in /var/lib, but I
don't think gconf.xml.defaults (which is modified by the local admin)
should go in /var/lib. gconf.xml.defaults contains configuration made by
the local admin.

> > If we have to make a change here I'd add a "schemas" source that's read
> > before the "defaults" source, and leave "defaults" in /etc
> 
> Why should it be read before? Shouldn't defaults set by the system
> administrators be read before defaults introduced by the schemas?

By "read before" I'm assuming "the last thing read wins"

> > That isn't the case I don't think. The admin default is /foo/bar. The
> > schema default is stored in the schema object at /schemas/foo/bar. The
> > package should not touch the admin default.
> 
> But gconftool already creates %gconf.xml files in
> /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults. Managing these files for both
> schema->default generation and administration is a nightmare.

If you want to split sysadmin changes from schemas, that makes sense.
But moving gconf.xml.defaults to /var/lib isn't the way to do that.

Havoc