Re: Windows and DLLs

[Alan Shutko <ats acm org>]

Are you disagreeing with the idea of a registry, or with the ideas of
allowing suers to set things at all?  (It seems your post listed
massive problems iwth every singnle way a user could set optiuons...)

Let's look at the heirarchy and see why it's a good idea (and why some
GNOME support to make it easy would be loverly.)

Per app setting:  These are the default settings we have right now.
They're good, you need them.  Normally, they're stored in a file
somewhere under GNOME.  They let you do things like specify thedefault
look of SameGnome.

Per user settings:  We have them to some degree.  These are also in
your home directory somewhere.  They let you specify global things,
like a desktop theme or add some new pixmaps for GNOME to use.
(Which, last I tried, didn't work.  I tried putting it in
~/.gnome/pixmaps and the panel didn't notice.  Did I do something
wrong?)

Per user setting s can also be things like your default web page (for
both Lynx and netscape), your newsserver, etc.

System-wide settings:  No, these aren't so John and Jane Doe can break
your things without hacking your account.  They're so the sysadmin can
do useful things like set a default global Gnome menu or set the
default NNTPSERVER or WWW_HOME.  All the items in the Gnome System
menu are system-wide defaults.  In a heirachal scheme, your
user-settings will override system settings, and app setitngs will
override user-wide settings.

There's no requirement that these settings be binary, or hard to find,
or any of that.  But they are useful.

(I don't quite understand what you mean by task-specific settings, so
I won't address them.)


-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - By consent of the corrupted
Cat advice; take time to eat some flowers.