An analysis about a generic desktop application configuration management system

[Maks Orlovich]

On Monday 11 April 2005 07:44 pm, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 07:22:40PM -0400, Maks Orlovich wrote:
> > > But if the control panel changes a setting and konqueror is supposed to
> > > notice, you have to provide a way of telling konqueror about it. 
> > > That's a cross-process notification.
> >
> > The notification here is trivial. Keeping things consistent is not, but
> > is unlikely to matter in a desktop setting. IOW, you don't normally have
> > dirty writes in memory for long.
>
> Please explain.  How does the control panel know that it's konqueror that
> needs the notification?  

It can emit a DCOP signal, name keyed by config file name. Konqueror can 
connect to it. 

And yes, there are all sorts of races involving starting konqueror 
concurrently with changing the settings and all that. THAT is hard to do 
without centralization without doing something synchronous. Though, well, 
there is always polling. And believe it or not, sometimes that's the best 
solution.