Re: GConf vs. bonobo-config

[Ramiro Estrugo <ramiro fateware com>]

Martin Baulig wrote:
> 
> You still miss the point.
> 
> If Nautilus is ported to bonobo-config, you can still use the gconf moniker
> and thus store all your configuration through GConf. So there's no change at
> all for the user.
> 

Thats the key, Martin.  "Nautilus is ported to bonobo-config."   That
means new code and new testing a lots of debugging to get things right.

Im sure the new scheme is beautiful and technically superior and cooks
breakfast lunch and dinner.  But its new code.  And one law of the
Universe is that new code (from any source - even Darin) means new
testing, debugging and so on.

So in Nautilus we spent a significant amount of time getting preferences
to work, now it sounds like when we port to GNOME 2.0 we'll have to redo
some of this work.  You can promise me that the backward compatible
layer will be perfect and mean no work for me.  My experience so far on
the project - and years before tell me this is not the way things work
in practice.

Now, im a pessimist.  I expect this kind of stuff to happen.  I wrote
the Nautilus preferences code so that it would be trivial to port to a
new scheme.  Im not trying to weasel out of the work.  Porting to the
new scheme is the easiest thing in the world to do.

The hard part is all the testing and debugging that has to happen to
make sure that the user's experience is not frustrating.  

That is my view from the Nautilus end.  I wont lose sleep over it.  If I
have to do the work, ill do it.  Something else will not get done, but
its a choice we make as a Project by reimplementing technologies as
such.

The part that makes me sad is that I am truly the customer for this
technology.  We use it extensively in Nautilus.  I want to use it in
even more projects and im sure other people do as well.  But the
standard where out of a whim something gets reimplement is not
attractive for potential developers. 

Perhaps you can argue that this is the price of "progress."  I think
that the technicalities in question are immensely trivial compared to
the overall message that this incident sends to potential developers.

-re

> One question:
> 
> 1.) Can GConf read GNOME 1.x and KDE configuration files ?
> 
> I guess so far we have no plan what to do with all the GNOME 1.x config
> in ~/.gnome once all apps are ported over to GNOME 2, or is there a plan for this ?
> --
> Martin Baulig

Are you asking me ?  I dont know.  In Nautilus we peek and poke some
things with gnome_config_ for the user's sake - like being able to use
the "old" background settings capplet.