Re: I guess I missed the whole point

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> Hang on.  Are you saying that with bononbo-conf the application decides
> what backend will be used to store the configuration data?  I thought one
> of the benefits of gconf was that this was opaque to the application
> author and under control of the user/sysadmin.  How is an app supposed to
> know what backend to use?

I believe the "config:" moniker is supposed to be used in a situation
where the application is config system agnostic. However, it concerns me
that people are needing to use alternative config systems to GConf. I
guess I can see some extreme cases, but in general I agree with the many
others who have voiced this that the benefit of having *ONE* config
system far outweighs the problems it might incur by not being
sufficiently specialized. (particularly for sysadmins, but I have
appreciated this ability in the windows registry too, as confusing and
convoluted as it is)

Policy decisions like this don't get made when they are deferred to the
programmer (unless one backend was radically superior to all the others,
and even then...people just don't know what to use sometimes, they'll
use the first thing they get working). Picture a programmer rooting
through the docs trying to make config work. He will probably use the
same system as the first example he sees and manages to replicate.
Policy decisions at times need to be firmly ingrained in the APIs we
provide. I am uncomfortable punting this off to the
random-application-developer-learning-to-use-gnome, which I fear
bonobo-config risks doing.

-Seth


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