An analysis about a generic desktop application configuration management system

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 10:03 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 00:19 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> > Yes, ok. You have a point here Avery. However. In order to get (for
> > example) my attention or to make me want to listen to requirements,
> > you'll need to at least try not to be rude.

> Philip, I think you're missing an important point here. The burden of
> proof (and doing the work) is on whoever is doing this new config
> system. Nobody else is required to care (and everyone else is free to
> ignore any proposed new config system)
> 
> So basically if you say "I won't listen to you" then the developers are
> pretty likely to say "OK, great, have fun" - they don't necessarily
> _care_ whether you listen to them or not because they have no obligation
> to use your code.

> I'm all for everyone being polite, but reality is reality. The power
> here is all with the core GNOME and KDE teams and if they say no, the
> answer is no.

You're right. And I apologise if I have upset people. 

Since you (and Avery) are right I decided to listen to his points. 

Perhaps, but only if glib is a _real_ problem, it's better to implement
the daemon without using glib at all. To standarize the protocol and to
provide a libdconf-glib.so and to make it possible for the KDE team to
implement using the daemon as a backend for KConfig (and extend KConfig
with notifications using the D-BUS signals that will have been
standarized). (also check my conversation with Waldo Bastian in this
xdg-list thread).

This implies that a standard should be created at protocol level. So not
only an API. And that the protocol isn't just an implementation detail
anymore.

The reason why I'd prefer using GObjects for the library is because
there's many language binding generators available for that. The
availability of up-to-date language-bindings is very important in the
GNOME world of desktop application development.

Other than this glib-issue, I already made my point about using D-BUS
rather than DCOP.


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
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http://www.pvanhoof.be/