DConf configuration system

[Patrick Patterson]

On Wednesday 06 April 2005 18:24, Chris Lee wrote:
> Let me explain. Not only would DConf be useless duplication of existing
> effort, but evangelizing it to different projects - including KDE and
> GNOME, not to mention OpenOffice.org and Mozilla and XFCE and ... -
> would take time, and effort, and the net result is that even *if*
> everyone adopted this cracktastic great new configuration system (which
> won't happen) they gain no major benefit from it. This won't help them
> work on Windows, or OS X.
>

Chris:

My interest in seeing something a bit more unified than the "every project 
uses it's own", is to make it so that there is a sane(er) way to roll out 50 
Desktops (I'm not going to say 1000, because we're going to have a problem 
with 50) and have central control of the desktop and system settings. I've 
been part of a team that built a system that allowed a central admin to 
change everyone's OpenOffice, Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, various system settings, 
etc.  - and it was VERY painfull. So we designed UniConf that could talk to 
the above, and give us a helping hand. 

I would LOVE it to see these systems more unified... it would make my job a 
lot easier, even though I realize that it's not going to happen unless we 
write it all ourselves - which is unfortunate, but every project has a fairly 
well ingrained (ourselves included) "Not invented here" culture... (there are 
exceptions - KDE throwing out Arts for GStreamer is rather notable :), Avi 
has made the same discovery with Elektra - which is why he's going one 
further than us (we just make our system play nice with yours), and actively 
submitting patches to various projects to make his system a choice for actual 
built in configuration.

So, I think there is a benefit in coming up with a standard, and starting the 
long and frustrating process of hoping that everyone will, if not adopt it, 
at least not go out of their way to be non-interoperable with it. 

That benefit is giving Administrators a way to configure their users desktop, 
and help users do things like replicate their settings to multiple computers 
(I realize that RSync works for KDE ini files, but that requires work to set 
up - not simply point my laptop at my desktops UniConf tree and say - keep 
this in sync please whenever you can - did I mention UniRetryGen before :) ).

just my 0.02 worth...

now everyone can flame away :)

-- 
Patrick Patterson
Technical Ambassador
Net Integration Technologies R&D
http://open.nit.ca