Re: Stage one finished

[Philip Van Hoof <spamfrommailing freax org>]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 11:16 -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The problem with this approach is that we'll have a huge change to gconf
> with no way to understand what the delta is between current and new.

I understand that. Cause of that, I was already getting more and more
worried about our changes.

We aren't planning to fork GConf :-\. But we do want a configuration-
system thats usable for all major desktop environments and applications.

> If I can suggest a somewhat different approach.

 
In summary:

 1. Create a new client library.

My (our) plans where to keep the current library as much as possible in
tact in the hopes that we create something more or less backwards
compatible.

 2. Create a test-suite

Something for when we have something thats actually working.

 3. Create a new daemon or adapt the current to export DBUS

Since also the default xml-backend needs a rewrite (many people aren't
satisfied with the XML-layout of the files, etc etc) this basically
means rewriting most of not all of the daemon.


so ...

When I add 1 with 2 and 3 .. it basically means rewriting GConf from
scratch. :-)


I came under the impression that GConf has all required features and
that rewriting it would be foolish. But now the original author of GConf
(afaik thats you, Havoc) is basically saying that perhaps it does need
an (almost) complete rewrite. So I'm a bit confused. Haha ;)

Well, rewriting is also okay for me.

If rewriting from scratch is whats needed, perhaps we should try getting
a larger development team and discuss this IRL on meetings like GUADEC
and KDE-meetings. Perhaps then we should try  getting the people of
KConfig, Mozilla and OpenOffice.org involved? Since our (Kristof and me)
target is to create a configuration system that can be used by most
desktop applications of the freedesktop world (so, OpenOffice.Org,
Mozilla, KDE, GNOME, Gtk+-only, perhaps even wine -- emulate the Windows
registry to GConf --).

Nevertheless, both me and Kristof are willing to help. Both with coding
and selling the idea. Normally I will attend the Guadec meeting this
year. The company where I'm employed (Cronos/X-Tend) is even sponsoring
me to go ;). Also, since I know Kristof in private and we don't live far
from each other, I'll drag him with me.





-- 
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