Re: GConf vs. bonobo-config

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Ramiro Estrugo <ramiro fateware com> writes:

> 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.

Nobody says that you must use it, just stick with GConf.

Nautilus is a large end-user application, and as GNOME 1.4 application I guess
it uses only GConf for all its configuration.

You only "need" to port it to bonobo-config if you want to read/write configuration
data which is shared between Nautilus and other applications.

> > 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.

Well, this code needs to be ported to bonobo-config. Using gnome_config_ from libcompat
doesn't help you very much when the control-center is using bonobo-config.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)