Re: GConf vs. bonobo-config

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

> bonobo-config has the same architecture nearly exactly. Which you
> would know if you had surveyed prior art in this area.

This sounds like a flame, but I will reply to you nonetheless.  

We did research GConf extensively, and the few bits that GConf has can
be trivially re-implemented in bonobo-conf (if not already done, as I
said, I am not the author/maintainer of Bonobo-conf).  

Bonobo-Conf provides a stackable model that can be used not only on
configuration databases, but on things that might expose configuration
databases from other sources, so it is indeed more extensible (for
example, I could pull data from a SQL server by plugging a
ConfigDatabase on gnome-db, no changes required to the moniker system,
nor to bonobo-conf at all).

> I have gotten zero bug reports on this. I'm genuinely interested in
> solving any problems you had. I can't believe you just paid Dietmar to
> work on something for months instead of reporting a bug. What a waste
> of everyone's time.

Dietmar has been working on something that is aligned to the goals of
a component architecture for Unix: reusing interfaces (to reduce the
area programmers have to learn), reusing CORBA, reusing Bonobo, making
use of the Moniker system for the object name space and to allow
stackable objects, CORBA_any support for storing arbitrarly complex
data.

Those were the goals, and bonobo-conf addresses those goals.  GConf
did not. 

Bug-wise: probably we should have reported the bugs, but it was a
better investment to work on the component platform than to work on
fixing a stop-gap measure. 

> And even funnier, I bet the issue was OAF running two gconfd or zero
> gconfd, not even a GConf bug. Sadly no one has ever fixed OAF.

I really can not remember the details.  It has been a whiel.

> Well, Evolution can do as it likes, but using the standard config
> system should be a requirement for inclusion in GNOME releases

For some reason that sounds like a threat, but I will assume it is
just a miss-communication in your part.  

I could make a similar argument about GConf: to be included in GNOME,
it should use the standard GNOME component architecture.  As you see,
we wont get anywhere.

Miguel.