Re: Will Gnome _EVER_ be stable?

[Josh Steiner <joschi eds org>]

On Wed, 13 Mar 2002, stan wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 03:57:31PM -0800, Josh Steiner wrote:
> > please stop spamming the list, this _is_ being worked on.  gconf will not
> > suffer the same issues as the old .gnome config stuff did.
> > 
> OK, 2 things here.
> 
> 1. I have no idea what you are talking about, gconf? Could you enlighten me?
>     What is it? Is it for Gnome 1.4 or is this a 2.0 thing? Does it still
> 	store config data in (yuck) binary files?

here is an older paper describing it:

http://developer.gnome.org/feature/archive/gconf/gconf.html

it has multiple storage backends, including the possiblity for having all
your preferences saved on a server, which i really look forward to.

> 2. The point i am trying to make, is that from my prespective, I'm seing
>    the _same_ instabilty that made me give up trying to use Gnome for
>    real work 3 to 4 years agao. So for me it does not appear that any 
>    progress has been made in this area in several years.
> 
>    Comercial UNIX software has always been held to a _very_ high  standard
>    for reliabilyt. Failing to meet these standards gas assured the failure
>    of a product. Not, mind you, that meeting them has assured the success 
>    of a product. But Gbnome will not be acepted by the people who are familiar
>    with these stnadrds till it meets them.

I beleive Gconf was really introduced around 1.4, but most applications
still use the old .gnome/* configuration system, Gnome 2.0 has ported most
of the applications to the new system which will be muich more maintanable
from both the application developer perspective (so you will see less loss
of setting with software updates in the future) and from the sysadmin
perspective (you wont need to figure out each systems individul config
file quirks).

This issue is being addressed.

________________________________________________________________
Josh .. Yoshi .. Joschi .. xiphoidprocess.com .. eds.org/~joschi