configuration system notes

[Avery Pennarun]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 12:01:20PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 17:25 +0200, Buola Buola wrote:
> > >  
> > I think the loading/enforcing schemas should take place in the daemon,
> > not in the client
> 
> GConf does this now, and it's wrong, and the web pages I posted explain
> why.

In fact, those web pages do a pretty lousy job of explaining why, but I
actually agree with you.  Three good reasons to enforce schemas at the
frontend instead of in the daemon:

 - you can produce C/C++ headers from the schema, and actually load the
   configuration content directly into an optimized local data structure
   that will be faster and smaller while the app runs.  (Of course this
   also gives you compile-time type checking in your app, which is nice.)
   
 - languages/apps that choose to completely ignore schemas have the option
   of doing so, and they don't inherit any schema enforcement overhead.

 - it makes it really easy to write my UniConf backend. :)

Have fun,

Avery