Re: config library idea

[Geoff Harrison <mandrake mandrake net>]

On Thu, Jul 23, 1998 at 07:19:48PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I had this idea a while ago and it recently came back up on debian-devel.
> 
> Much of libgnome, but gnome-config in particular, has reasonably wide
> application outside of Gnome. It is a potential solution to the eternally
> annoying (to me anyway) Yet Another File Format problem. This makes
> LinuxConf, for example, a major pain: parsers have to be written for all
> these formats. Formats are also rarely designed with machine-management
> (generation and modification) in mind. It's a big drag on GUI development -
> who wants to write something cool like a Gtk style editor if they have to
> figure out how to machine-modify a gtkrc first? Yuck.
> 
> Now there's no way to get rid of legacy formats, but we could make it easier
> to avoid this problem with new applications by separating the gnome-config
> facilities from the rest of gnome and making them available to application
> writers. As a side benefit, we might expect people to hack on gnome-config
> and add some of the missing features like LDAP or whatever people want.
> Basically get wider exposure for the config library by breaking it out of
> the difficult Gnome compile, thus leading to more hacking on it and more
> config file standardization in the free Unix clone world.
> 
> Two other ideas: fold gnome-config into glib instead of making it its own
> mini-library, and/or work with WindowMaker's libPropList and add some of 
> the features from there (e.g. it looks like it handles tree-shaped data a 
> lot better).

Actually I'm already in the process of writing something very useful 
that is along these tracks.  I'll be putting up a little bit of information
about it soon.

-- 
Geoff Harrison (http://mandrake.net)
Senior Systems Engineer
Intellimedia Commerce (http://www.intellimedia.com)
Author, MAW Shell Replacement (http://mandrake.net/MAW)
Co-Author, Enlightenment Window Manager (http://www.enlightenment.org)
phone: (404)262-0001x102