DConf configuration system

[Dave Cridland]

On Wed Apr  6 23:24:25 2005, Chris Lee wrote:
> Jamie McCracken wrote:
>> Calm down.
>> 
>> I dont believe anyone here wanted to piss off any of the 
>> developers from any desktop.
> 
> Amazingly, people sometimes do things they didn't intend. Surprise, 
> actions have consequences! When you refer to members of a group in 
> the third person, and they happen to be on the same list, reading 
> the messages you're sending, and you're effectively saying that 
> they're idiots, you *may* run the risk of angering a few of them. 
> Just possibly.

Apparently very slowly. I think this particular flamewar ended some 
time ago.

I'm terribly amused by your use of "Us and Them" in your previous 
pointless verbage, it really enthuses me as to the delights of KDE 
and GNOME interaction, and summarizes the whole thing nicely for me.


> 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.
> 
> 
No, I don't think a shared config system *is* a duplication of 
effort. Currently, a third party app cannot possibly know which of 
the many crack-induced configuration systems are in use. A single 
point of entry, a shared configuration namespace, etc - these are 
important things for those of us who use our desktops, and don't just 
religiously use one set of approved applications.

Maybe Mozilla uses D-Conf - so what if they have to do different 
things on Windows or Mac OS X? If a cross-platform app happens to 
have a single place to get preferences from on free desktops, that's 
*got* to be a better situation than exists now.

Yes, yes, I know UniConf exists, but what I don't know is if it's 
being used. And there's no way for Mozilla to tell. A single, 
well-specified, entry point to "the configuration" is needed, and 
vital.

I've no doubt that it'll make no difference to you, nor the many 
GNOME zealots on the list, because you'd all rather die than use a 
different desktop's app, but if Windows and Mac OS X can manage to 
provide a single unified configuration system, why can't we?

Dave.