GConf (was Re: [gnome-love] Start-Menu)




Let me tell you my own impression on GConf. I'm a programmer, not a
clueless computer illiterate, yet I see gconf-editor and in the tree I
see a bunch of application settings, and a node that says schemas.
What is 'schemas'?? I know the definition of schema because I know a
little of XML (most users won't know), but yet I wonder what the hell
is doing that node there. I explore a little bit and see lots of keys
and I wonder why I can't do anything with them, why I have some
duplicates of some of the application settings and why I have no help
anywhere on what they are (somebody told me about 'locking down'
settings, but I don't know if this has something to do with it, and
I'm not interested in finding out, because I don't need that feature).


This is not an inherent problem to GConf, but gconf-editor which has a
bad ui...


I am not against these features, but one should have a simplified
version like two functions, one to set a setting and other to retrieve
it. That's it. 

If you only want to store and retrieve settings, you don't need to
install a schema at all. The schema's main purpose is to define default
values if some prefs in your app need default values. It can also be
used by sysadmins to lock certain config options to some values, but
it's up to them to write the corresponding xml file if they want to do
that. 
So it seems your main problems with GConf comes from the lack of good
doc and copy and paste code to install a schema, along with some good
explanations about the schema purpose :)
And the ability of GConf to notify apps when a pref changes just rock :)

Hope that helps,

Christophe

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Ceci est une partie de message numériquement signée



[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]