[pulseaudio-discuss] [PATCH] module-gsettings: new module to store configuration using gsettings

[Arun Raghavan]

On Fri, 9 Sep 2016, at 11:19 PM, Tanu Kaskinen wrote:
> On Mon, 2016-07-25 at 21:58 +0200, Sylvain Baubeau wrote:
> > 2016-04-26 12:47 GMT+02:00 Tanu Kaskinen <tanuk at iki.fi>:
> > > * There doesn't seem to be support for migrating existing settings from
> > > GConf to GSettings. paprefs will initially keep using GConf, so in the
> > > transition period I think both module-gconf and module-gsettings should
> > > be loaded. Settings stored in the two databases should be synchronized,
> > > so that when paprefs is updated to use GSettings, the old settings will
> > > be remembered.
> > 
> > I did write a patch for paprefs that moves from GConf to GSettings
> > (available here : https://github.com/lebauce/paprefs). It provides a
> > "paprefs.convert" file for the "gsettings-data-convert" utility that
> > will migrate existing settings from GConf to GSettings. On Fedora,
> > putting a .convert file into /usr/share/GConf/gsettings/ will trigger
> > a migration of the settings at next boot IIRC.
> 
> I believe it's possible to implement a migration scheme that is
> invisible to users. The proposed scheme is not seamless: when the user
> upgrades the system, the old settings won't be available to paprefs
> before the next login, and new settings won't have any effect either.
> Also, there's no guarantee that pulseaudio and paprefs will get updated
> synchronously. If pulseaudio is upgraded first, then... hmm... you
> don't seem to be loading module-gsettings in default.pa. How do you
> propose the daemon configuration to be updated? Should both modules be
> loaded? Or should module-gconf be replaced by module-gsettings? So it's
> unclear what happens if pulseaudio is upgraded first, but if paprefs is
> upgraded first, then paprefs will not work until pulseaudio gets
> updated, because there's nothing in the server that would react to
> changes in the gsettings store.
> 
> I'm not necessarily demanding a perfect migration scheme, if Fedora is
> ok with an imperfect one, but it has to be possible to build both
> pulseaudio and paprefs with gconf and without gsettings, so that we
> don't force this decision on all distributions. Pulseaudio clearly
> satisfies this condition - gconf support is not dropped, and gsettings
> is disabled by default - but your paprefs patch removes the option to
> build it with gconf support.

Is GConf still used/relevant? My understanding is that it is broadly no
longer encourage to be used at all.

So unless MATE and co. are actually using it, I don't think it's a bad
idea to drop it (the paprefs dep can be upgraded to latest PA with
gsettings-only support).

-- Arun