Re: About GNOME 2.0 - The end of a dream

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 16Jun2001 06:43PM (-0400), Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Martin, a) this issue is already resolved 

I hate to pour more potential fuel on the fire, and I've been trying
to stay out of this as much as possible, but...

I guess it's not totally clear to me that the issue is resolved. It
seems that everyone agrees that gnome-libs should use gconf as the
back-end to store it's settings (which can be achieved either by using
the bonobo-config API with the GConf moniker or using the GConf API
directly). I think there are still two open issues:

* Should gnome-libs use bonobo-config, or GConf directly? I guess this
is really only an implementation detail so I think it doesn't matter
much except for unnecessary runtime dependencies. 

* Should bonobo-config support changing to a non-GConf database? If it
does this, we run the risk of fragmenting configuration mechanisms,
with different apps able to access different sets of settings, and
breaking the sysadmin single point of control that GConf is intended
to provide. I would really like to see all config back ends available
through either the GConf API or the bonobo-config API, and centrally
configured in one place. I think this is a wortwhile feature, and I
don't see what the non-GConf back ends add that outweighs it. If there
are performance concerns, I'm pretty sure Havoc will fix GConf as
necessary in response to problem reports that include profile data.

How do people feel about these two issues?

Regards,

Maciej