Elektrified X.org released (was: X configuration paradigm, and a proposal)

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 11:23 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 12:18:21PM -0300, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> > don't permit HW vendors, or X plugin writers, to independently extend
> > it. Whit a key/value pair paradigm, these folks can write a 10-line
> > Shell script to correctly integrate itself in X, without having to
> > deal with a lexical parser, complex structs, and C.
> 
> In all the systems I've seen so far trying to just burn disk and performance
> with simple key/value pairs this isn't true because
> 
> 	1.	You need to do locking
> 	2.	You need to do atomic changes of multiple keys
> 	3.	You might run out of disk space
> 	4.	You need rollback
> 
> The current xorg.conf certainly doesn't solve these either but anything trying
> to be a grad unified config scheme just won't work with one file per key.
> Gconf proved that pretty conclusively.
> 

Yes.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/plans.html

The issue isn't really one file per key (though I think that's wrong -
even gconf is one file per directory, not per key). It's that you need
to address transactions, locking, error handling, and notifications.

Havoc