Re: config library, was GNOME registry

["Joshua R. Prismon" <josh narf com>]

Actually, this is where XML would be very usefull. 

I think we are getting ahead of ourselves here. What
are the requirements for what we want to do?

1) Provide a generic/cheap interface to get/set configuration information. 

2) Provide some mechanism where we can store config information in a 
	number of ways. 

3) Provide some mechanism where a universal control application could be
	designed. 

4) Provide someway to ensure that configuration information is not vunderable. 

So here is what I fleashed out beyond that:

1) Provide a generic/cheap interface to get/set configuration information. 

Additional requirements:
	- Usable from any language (corba?)
	- Linkable into a exec for non Gnome Applications?
	- Handle failures (LDAP database going down, for example) gracefully. 

In my opinion, it would be easy to do this in a Unix Library/Corba Service.
(speaking
of which, while KDE and GNOME haven't gotten along very well, this would be
a great
place to try and unify the two teams. It would ensure that we don't spend
massive amount
of time rebuilding each others code. (ie, both control panels could
configure anything). 

2) Provide some mechanism where we can store config information in a 
	number of ways. 
Adition Requirements: 
	- Some sort of caching method? 
	- Translators (ala what COAS and LinuxConf are doing). 
	- LDAP/Text/DB formats. 

3) Provide some mechanism where a universal control application could be
	designed. 
	- This is where XML would be usefull. We could have applications give
	 us XML structures to desribe the data. using these XML structures, we
	 can create a universal control panel that would be capible of admining
	 anything, so long as it has a XML struct for it. 

4) Provide someway to ensure that configuration information is not vunderable. 
	- this would be why you would want to store info in a text file. Further, we
	 have to assume that there is some way (a text cache?) to boot up a system
	 even if some of the configuration services (LDAP or a corrupted DB) are
down.