Re: GConf and bonobo-conf

["Colm Smyth [RU-Ireland]" <colms ireland sun com>]

One issue I have raised previously with CORBA_Any support is that
it has the potential to create configuration versioning issues.

The goal of CORBA_Any support is to help developers by allowing
them to store arbitrary structures in the configuration store.
These structures may easily change, leading to incompatibilities
if there is an attempt to restore the information from the store
(CORBA_Any support would require perfect binary restoration).

I think it makes more sense to think about what configuration
data you want to store and how you want to store it.

If you really want to throw arbitrary data into GConf, there is
nothing to stop you; you just need to encode your CORBA_Any as
a string and use the GConf string storage. You just need to remember
that you can't evolve your structures; if a user uses a GNOME 2.0 
application and their app stores some configuration data, that user
will want to continue to use that configuration even if they later
upgrade to GNOME 2.1 say.

I'm much more in favour of de-composing structures down into
elementary configuration data items as these can be more robustly
restored. This is an essential difference that could be compared
to the difference between say serializing a Java object as meta-data-rich
binary data and doing the same thing but writing out to XML. The XML
is simply a more evolve-able data store; so is a collection of primitive
configuration data items stored in GConf.

Colm.

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>To: Dietmar Maurer <dietmar ximian com>
>Cc: gconf-list gnome org, gnome-hackers gnome org
>Subject: Re: GConf and bonobo-conf
>From: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>
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>
>Hi,
>
>As a suggestion, I think it would be helpful to describe several
>use-cases of the CORBA_any feature. i.e. examples of what an app would
>use it for, and why it's better than other possible options in those
>cases.
>
>Havoc
>
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