On Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:07:27 +0100 Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com> wrote: > On Mon, 2009-03-02 at 11:54 -0500, David Zeuthen wrote: > > > So I don't really have a good response to any of this; the way I > > see it, GConf and gnome-keyring are currently pretty hard deps in > > GVfs and I don't expect that to change until someone invents > > something better either at the GLib level or at the freedesktop.org > > level. > > > > Of course this is just my view of the world, Alex is the GVfs > > maintainer and he might have different views on this. > > I'm not particularly fond of the gconf dependency with its dependency > on CORBA and whatnot, and try to keep use of it down. However, some > use is needed to integrate with the desktop settings. I'm hoping that > dconf/GSettings will eventually land so that we can drop it. Can you elaborate what GConf is used for exactly? I've only browsed a few source files and it occurs to me that it's used 1) for URI handlers and 2) samba workgroup name amongst other things. I'm wondering whether getters like the one used in 2) couldn't be done without a dependency on GConf. One could just check for the existance of gconftool and use that for getting the setting instead of linking with GConf. That way distributions wouldn't have to make GVfs depend on GConf but everyone using GNOME would get the same behaviour as we have right now. I'm also wondering whether things like 1) -- the gconf/ folder in the GVfs tree -- shouldn't be moved out of GVfs. It's clearly tied to GNOME. > Gnome-keyring however is very useful and I don't see that going away > as a dependency. Gnome-keyring doesn't have a lot of dependencies > though, only glib/gtk + minor use of gconf. I'd rather have the xfce > people work with the gnome-keyring people so that it can be shared by > both desktops. gnome-keyring indeed is useful and its dependencies look alright -- except for GConf again, which is not used in Xfce at all. For it to be shared by GNOME and Xfce, either dconf will have to become ready sometime soon or its dependency on GConf will have to be removed. I can see why using GConf is convenient here, considering that it already is part of the GNOME stack. But since GVfs is pretty much the only real choice of GIO extensions in the GLib land and distributions are likely to turn optional dependencies into normal ones, this is a sensitive topic. People outside GNOME want GVfs but are of course concerned about GNOME dependencies. We'd be really interested in seing dconf evolve and eventually replace GConf as we might switch to it as well. But in the meantime, having GConf in our stack is far from what we want. Cheers, Jannis
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