Re: Windows and DLLs

[Liss Svanberg <lisss ydab se>]

In a previous message Alan Shutko [ats@acm.org] wrote:

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

I'm disagreeing with the idea of a registry, at least the way windows 
implements it.
Of course a user *must* have the possibility to set options!
The discussion was about whether or not setup files (like .ini, .cfg or 
.config) was a bad thing or not.
(Otherwise I've missunderstood the mail that I answered to)

> 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.

Hirrrrr!
Again, the discussion was about whether or not setup files (like .ini, .cfg 
or .config) were a bad thing or not.
I want setup files to my per-app-settings, because I'll know where to find 
them!
Of course, these settings will be global, systemwide for the app.
But the system should *not* care about them - they are not, and should not 
be systemwide in that sentence.


> 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.

Did I disagree with that?

> 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.

Yes, they can!
If both them and I are using the same application, foo.app.
If foo.app stores system-wide settings in it's user setup.
(This is quite commonly in windows, let's not make it commonly in UNIX!)
Systemwide settings can in this case mean both settings that alter the 
behaviour of the whole system, or settings that alter the behaviour of 
foo.app *in* the whole system regardless of who are running it, or from 
where it runs.

Perhaps I made this unclear.
(Of course system wide settings must exist, of both kind. But leave them in 
the ini/fg/config files!)


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

If you store them like windows does, they are.
(But, okay, why store them like windows! If we store them like 
ini/cfg/config files, they are not hard to find)

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

Hmm. I think the task-specific settings went into the wrong letter.
Anyway, task-specific settings are settings for certain events, or job 
types. As the oposite of app-specific settings.



mvh
// Liss
liss@ydab.se