DConf configuration system

[Avery Pennarun]

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!

(Currently, the way we use iterators today, libnss-uniconf is faster and
more resilient to network failure than libnss-ldap.)

Of course, desktop apps tend to be much longer-lived than command line
utilities.  In the spirit of d-vfs, we could just ignore command line
utilities, I suppose.  But from everything I've seen, iteration is much more
common than you might think at first glance.  Powerful, flexible iteration
is one of the most useful features of UniConf, because it allows you to
express complex thoughts with a very small amount of code.

Have fun,

Avery