DConf configuration system

[Jamie McCracken]

Avery Pennarun wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 02:00:13PM -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> 
> 
>>Hmm, would it really be a problem for such an app (which would not be
>>used very often at all by normal desktop users) to just grab all the
>>keys?  If it is a real performance killer (I'll trust your experience in
>>this), then that would make "folders" necessary.  With a real defined
>>need, I have no further objections to them.  :)
> 
> 
> One example I can give is libnss-uniconf.  When I run "id -a apenwarr", it
> needs to look up the list of groups that "apenwarr" is in.  Generally
> (regardless of the actual layout of keys you're using) this will require a
> tree iteration of some sort.  Downloading the complete set of 100000 keys in
> order to display five of them will definitely make your "id" command run
> much more slowly!

Thats trivial for an SQL DB to handle. Indeed the B+ tree indexes in a 
DB will give you the fastest and most efficient filtering currently 
available for that.

The fact that you are using one file per key in Uniconf will give 
terrible performance (due to large number of disk seeks) in general 
usage compared to a DB (which consequently minimises the no of disk reads).

I realise Uniconf can use different backends (as do all the others) but 
I dont see your example as being a good reason to use it over others.

If Uniconf is really suitable as a desktop config system then why are 
some of us looking into creating an alternative like DConf?

jamie