Re: preferences, sessions, etc. notes

[Bradford Hovinen <hovinen ximian com>]

On Thu, 2001-09-20 at 06:18, Glynn Foster wrote:
> > Archiver: stores XML files with date-stamped dumps of current state,
> > and can stuff the snapshot from any date back into the config
> > system. (right?)
> 
> I still can't figure out the usefulness of the archiver. It seems just a 
> way of doing multiple undos throughout time and in the age of having 
> dialogs that are simple according to usability needs, is this such a 
> feature to have? I need convincing I guess...

A bit of clarification here: the archiver was originally written for the
Ximian Setup Tools, to support rollback, location management, and remote
administration. Early on, we realized that we could very easily add
support for the archiver to the capplets. This facilitates debugging
(since I would rather not foobar my system while checking out the
archiver's functionality), and it logically completes the rollback
paradigm for the user (so that we don't get "Huh? Why can I roll back
this but not this?"). Now I know that there are people out there who
would appreciate rollback functionality for their configuration, for
example my father, who is not terribly computer literate, has from time
to time telephoned me and expressed distaste that someone came in and
totally screwed up his desktop's configuration. It would be nice to be
able to tell him "Just open up this program, move this slider over, and
click this button, and everything will be back the way it was".