Bookmarks shared among desktop environments

[Jamie McCracken]

Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> 
> Agreed bookmarks are very close to configuration data (preferences), in
> fact they are application-data. That's because they are created because
> of interaction with the user.
> 
> Preferences are more static: The user sets them, and then works with the
> application that will play by the rules it can read from these settings.
> 
> So it's not a valid use-case to add bookmarks to the configuration data.

I see little difference. Recent file lists, bookmarks - these are all 
prefs or config options even if they are set automonously. It is 
desirable to have one storage facility for all these so why not DConf?

What we need as Avery pointed out is a standard shareable key structure 
to accomplish this.

> 
> At this moment one of the few applications that shares application data
> across different desktop applications is the Evolution data server
> (eds). It's main purpose is to share contacts and calendaring
> information.
> 
> It would be a very good idea to create a generic shareable application-
> data access system. 
> 
> Some use-cases to start with:
> 
> 	o. Bookmarks
> 		o. Browser/WebSurfing bookmarks
> 		o. Filemanager bookmarks
> 			o. My Documents
> 			o. My Photos
> 			o. Etcetera
> 
> 	o. Contacts
> 		o. Instant Messaging Contacts
> 
> 	o. Calendar
> 		o. Agenda
> 
> 
> I'm not sure this belongs to D-Conf. However. It can be integrated with
> D-Conf. Provided the use-cases of D-Conf will be extended. So more
> analysis, more code, more ... 

its trivial for db backends like sqlite. Specify an xml schema and you 
should be able to generate a table for it (ditto with xml databases). Im 
willing to do all the extra work for this but recognise that its only 
really applicable to relational databases (as opposed to KVP's like LDAP 
and Bereley DB) so we need to be careful as strucured data access might 
not be as network transparent if you relied upon LDAP (although you 
could put the db on an NFS mount or use a client/server RDBMS if you 
really did need this).

Whilst you could restrict Dconf to key value pairs, the benefits of more 
structured storage are more obvious to other things like the mime type 
database, address books and all the other freedesktop storage mechanisms 
(menues, session variables et al).

I do believe strongly that we need a global config system and not the 
current mess of dot files, xml files, session vars et al that are 
currently used.

jamie.