Re: control center plans, etc.

[Colm Smyth <Colm Smyth Sun COM>]

>Delivered-To: gnome-private-members gnome org
>Delivered-To: gnome-hackers gnome org
>Subject: Re: control center plans, etc.
>From: Gediminas Paulauskas <menesis delfi lt>
>To: Bradford Hovinen <hovinen ximian com>
>Cc: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>, jacob ximian com, 
gnome-hackers gnome org, gnomecc-list gnome org
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>
>On 21 Jun 2001 11:52:05 -0400, Bradford Hovinen wrote:
>> I also agree that the XML archiver should not be part of XST. One
>> possibility would be to put it in bonobo-conf and have a configuration
>> moniker that, acting as a wrapper, archives data with it. There are
>> numerous other possibilties, though, and I am not committed to any one.
>
>Cool idea. Every preferences dialog has a slider or similar thing, so
>there is no need of try/revert or apply/restore. Changing options has
>immediate effect (except for expensive operations, as theme change), and
>with a slider you can roll back to some fixed positions: before opening
>this dialog, yesterday, factory defaults. I don't think other time
>positions are useful, but they may be.

I agree the XST archiver should be independent of XST, but it
should be a top-level GNOME technology because it may be used
by multiple other GNOME technologies, at least GConf and
Bonobo-config. It needs a fast indexing mechanism
for extracting segments during roll-forward/back.

It also needs to be DTD-neutral, so it's own storage
mechanism should probably not be XML (actually it
should probably just be an indexed binary file,
easily implementable using BerkeleyDB or gddm).

What is needed to make this work is to provide a simple
function (that is part of an existing storage API) to name
"bookmarks" during the process of (for example) changing
configuration information. The initial state is one such
"bookmark". The beginning and end of a GConf transaction
could be a "bookmark"ed segment that may be rolled back.

We should not need to hack dozens of applications to
add this capability (as has happened with the capplets
for example); it can be a transparent feature of the
storage (e.g. configuration) API.

Colm.