Re: Merging gconf-dbus(-2.6) to HEAD

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

Hi there,

We (Kristof Vansant and me) aren't anywhere near a finished product and
at this moment the flesh of the animal gconf is laying all bleeding and
teared apart on the table. 

Indeed. Nothing is working.

We decided to do all this on a complete separate repository (more or
less private but you can ask me for an account).

	http://cvs.freax.be/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/gconf-3/

So not even a branch in cvs.gnome.org. We first want to get all it
working because in all honesty we don't yet even know whether or not
we'll ever get something finished. Another reason for temporarily
putting it on that locations is: Both of us do have accounts on
cvs.gnome.org but we really like to get going in stead of nicely asking
for permission to create a branch in which we destroy and break
everything.

Our plans are to redo all of the build-environment. To completely remove
orbit and implementations using orbit. To introduce dbus (and only
support dbus). To completely remove Gtk+ testapplications. To rewrite
the sanity-check (remove Gtk+ applications).

Plus

To move all the different tools into their own directory.

Put gconftool-3 in gconftool/
Put libgconf-3 in libgconf/
Put gconfd-3 in daemon/
Put sanity-check-3 in sanity-check/

Discard the po/ doc/ examples/ and tests/ directories (perhaps later we
can glue existing stuff, no priority at this moment).

Move backends/* to backends/xml/

Create an ipc-layer (one) in daemon/ipc/dbus or in ipc/dbus as a
separate library (we aren't yet at the stage of deciding whether or not
we are going to do this in a so-library like the backends).

Both of us have zero experience with D-BUS. I personally have quite a
lot experience with ORBit-2. And for both of us it's the first time we
look into the code of GConf. Kristof knows a lot about build-
environments and both he and me want to learn developing with D-BUS and
want to actually do something with the concept "cross desktop
environments". So, indeed, our main reasons are trying to get GConf
usable as the freedesktop configuration management system.

These are NO promises whatsoever. Chances are very high we'll bump into
protest or simply both of us might at some point don't have enough time
(to busy with our professional and personal lives). Nevertheless, we are
going to try. Both of us really really really want a cross desktop
configuration system that will be used by most applications of the free
desktop (that includes typical KDE applications).

Help from anybody is appreciated. I don't want yet another a flamewar. I
do like technical discussions and help. Preferable in the form of code.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: philip dot vanhoof at cronos dot be
junk: philip dot vanhoof at gmail dot com
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org