Re: GConf vs. bonobo-config

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2001 at 07:54:17PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> I would distinguish these by saying: whether GConf is used affects
> sysadmins and users of the desktop in a significant way. Or rather,
> whether we have a single config system that meets the requirements I
> think it should meet affects sysadmins and users. 
> 
> Whether GConf uses Bonobo is completely invisible to users, it is
> purely an issue that affects programmers. If I changed it to use
> Bonobo today, the only thing users would notice is that the code churn
> introduced new bugs.
> 
> Of course, in saying that GConf must be used for GNOME apps

I would agree that the selection of gconf vs PropertyBag as the
config api is not directly visible the user.  However, as a 'must be
used' api it is certainly at least indirectly visible to pure end
users.  Sysadmins as programmers of last resort will need to access
to the api at times.  Developers will need to time to convert to one
or the other when it is selected.

Sweeping Bonobo or CORBA under the rug as an implantation detail is
only viable if we assume that the gconf C api is the target.  That
is a question that seems to still be under debate.

Which api is it going to be ?

I'll vote my two cents.

Havoc : You characterised of bonobo-config as using the main
        ideas of gconf with some additional syntactic sugar,

Deitmar : You described using CORBA_Any to remove yet another
          discriminated union, and reusing the Bonobo
	  Listener/PropertyBag apis.  However, you lost system level
	  overrides for performance reasons.