Re: gnome (gconf) saga - please read

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

ERDI Gergo <cactus cactus rulez org> writes:
> To add a sad truth to this: I've long ago removed the w flag from all my
> important files in ~/.gnome, to avoid corruptions. Yes, that means I can't
> change some settings. No, I don't miss them, it Just Works.
> 

Think about the case where this stuff breaks or could break:

 a) bug in libgnome that saves things incorrectly; 
    seems very unlikely at this point, the code is quite old
    and heavily-tested and even predates gnome
 b) lack of locking; two apps try to write the same file 
    at once, things blow up. But as we're seeing with 
    gconf which has locking, locking introduces its
    own fun. ;-) I think saving the session 
    is probably when most lack-of-locking corruption 
    happens.
 c) lack of error handling; failure to write files 
    atomically so running out of disk space causes
    problems. Most likely uncommon, libgnome may 
    even handle this.
 d) app bug - app writes junk to the libgnome API. 
 e) app bug - app prefs code makes no sense and makes
    people think prefs were "lost" when really things
    are working as "designed" (e.g. gnome-terminal)

GNOME 2 helps a good bit with most of these issues.

Havoc