Re: GConf vs. bonobo-config

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

I've been trying to think how I can productively contribute
to this discussion since:

 - I'm not a config system expert 
 - I obviously have talked to Havoc a lot, and Dietmar not at all.

But you know, I don't think the details really matter:

 - GConf was part of the gnome-1.4, bonobo-conf* wasn't.

 - Adding major subsystem for GNOME-1.4 and then deprecating
   again directly afterwards is clearly an unacceptable
   level of churn.

 - We can't have two configuration daemons and two ways
   of sysadmins to adminster system configuration daemons.
   That clearly introduces unacceptable levels of:

    a) bloat
    b) confusion

   The fact that bonobo-conf* has a backend that can use
   GConf doesn't change this. There is no way a system
   administrator or programmer can be expected to make
   sense of a system that involves:

                     Backend A
     bonobo-config /__ Backend B    Backend C
                   \ GConf________ /_ Backend D
                   /               \Backend E
     Other clients
                                   

   And no way that this is going to work reliably.

The fact that Evolution is using bonobo-config/conf now is
unfortunate. It probably can't be fixed for the version of
Evolution that is going out against the GNOME-1.4 platform
but I hope the next of Evolution will switch to something
that works properly with the rest of GNOME, such as a
Bonobo/CORBA typed wrapper around GConf.

But the idea of replacing GConf with a new system for
GNOME-2.0 is a complete non-starter. We can't do this. And
if we could possibly have done this, we'd have to have
decided to do this at GUADEC, if not well before.

Regards,
                                        Owen