Re: hardcoded values in ~/.gconf

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 07:26:32PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 04, 2003 at 09:13:41PM -0400, Jody Goldberg wrote: 
> > If this is going to be solved I'd like to see something a smidge
> > more powerful.  If hard coding HOME is an issue, the same will hold
> > true for various other system dirs.
> > 
> > eg in gnumeric it irks me that we end up storing paths like
> >     /local/gnome22/test/lib/gnumeric/1.1.18/plugins/fn-info
> > 
> > Where I'd rather be smarter and do something like
> >     &gnumeric_libdir;plugins/fn-info
> 
> Proposed API for that? Maybe just
> gconf_client_set_filename_munge_func()?

I discussed this with markmc a few weeks back and wanted to get the
resulting thoughts out to the list before they were lost.

My initial plan had been to have a client register a set of
    symbolic name -> path
pairs.  Then introduce a new type, 'filename' that would check the
supplied string for know prefixes and store it as
    symbolicname:remainder

Mark prefered not to push this complexity out to the backends and
suggested apps use the simpler
    set_string (client, "$(symbolic)/remainder");
and that gconf would provide a 'convenince hack for GConfClient' to
read the results.

<markmc>	anyway, I think we could come up with a sane encoding
<markmc>	and the APIs would handle the escaping