An analysis about a generic desktop application configuration management system

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 19:31 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 20:44 +0100, Dave Cridland wrote:
> > I thought GConf supported atomically setting multiple keys at once? 
> 
> It doesn't. It has an API (GConfChangeSet) that could in principle do
> this, but it currently doesn't.


I can imagine the need for an atomic "commit" when combining it with
notifications.

For example when an application opens a transaction for pushing a bunch
of changes that depend on each other, the notification-signal will only
be send to other interested applications, after the "commit" happened.

That way both the other applications and the developer of the first
application are sure all the keys that are perhaps related to a certain
key are set, before the other applications receive a notification about
it.

This was the first feature I thought of after thinking about a use for
atomically setting multiple keys. So being atomic on the application
level. Not just the in backend: "making the data persistent". Which is
less important for the application developers of the system. Sure it's
fun and cool to be atomic in the data storage layer. But in all honesty,
desktop application developers don't care much. Persistency of
configuration data is the problem of the user or the administrator (or,
the aim is to make it the problem of this D-Conf, of course).


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
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