gconf question

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 12:04 -0700, John Galloway wrote:
> True (I think) but there is system configuration needed (the location of
> the gconf settings sources) which if not setup are going to at best  
> return
> emtpy strings for any call if none of that has been setup and at  
> worst is
> going to just explode if gconfd can't be started.  For systems
> that are not going to be using gconf at all, this seems a long way  
> around
> to find this out.

Well, gconf is a requirement for gnome-mount, that's not going to
change, sorry.

> > I also think all this is subject to change when ORBit is
> > replaced by D-BUS (Nokia got patches IIRC). But I could be wrong.
> There is a gconf-dbus branch that split off 18 months or so ago  
> (imendio)
> but that is not going to be merged back in.  Also while there has been
> some talk about replacing Orbit with Dbus, I don't think any actual work
> is being done along these lines.

Oh, the impression I've got from being at GUADEC is that this might
happen soon. For example alexl just merged a similar patch to gnome-vfs
replacing ORBit with D-BUS. I could be wrong on when this is going to
happen though; does anyone know?

> I'd like to see the use, or not, of gconf to be a configure setting.   
> I don't
> care which way the default goes, but I'd like to not have to link  
> against
> the gconf libs or ever try to start the daemon if I know no such  
> thing exists (i.e.
> on our system gconfd does not exist).

No, that just doesn't make sense at all. gnome-mount is written
specifically for GNOME and as such will leverage GNOME infrastructure
such as gconf and gnome-keyring. I've been very clear about this and it
seems to me that KDE and/or SUSE is doing a similar thing. 

And that's fine, it's intentional that desktops should take advantage of
their native technologies, at least until we have shared technologies in
these areas (but I'm not holding my breath for dconf, dkeyring etc.). At
least we get to share the mechanism, e.g. HAL.

You are, however, free to contribute e.g. hal-mount scripts / code
similar to gnome-mount we can ship in the hal tarball. I actually think
many command line users would like that. Thanks.

Btw, I'm curious what the problem with pulling in gconf, gnome-keyring
etc. here is?

Cheers,
David