Conclusions and a compact list of requirements for deconf-spec

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Mon, 2005-12-12 at 11:41 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> There's better ways to handle type safety (schemas). It's a cheap way to
> get rid of the problems GConf has with performance and memory usage,
> mainly caused by the current schema handling, by moving the problem to
> the hands of the desktop application developers. Also the possibility of
> caching of such schema's (and reusing the cache between processes in a
> clean platform independent way -- so shared memory isn't an option) is
> now eliminated.

Sorry for doing this flame-war style by replying replying ;-). I forgot
to mention my current idea.

My current idea for the deconf-desk service is to "only" cache the type
signatures of the keys in the service's process address space. This can
be written (with some bitwise operations and other cool techniques) in
extremely small bitmaps and or lists. This can even be made mmap'able on
some platforms. There's not going to be a possible way to tell me that
it'll have a big impact on performance or memory of that service. It
just wont. There's simply WAY to many ways to solve this. The only
things needed to be cached in the service (for network transparency to
be made possible) is things like the type information.

If the network admin overwrites the default "values", then of course
also that is to be stored (and can also be made mmap'able since all that
doesn't have to be humanly readable at all: this data isn't specified so
it's an implementation detail). The whole idea of network transparency
is overwriting (overloading) the default value, and force eliminating
the custom user value via a central administrative location (over the
wire) ... in a secure way (of course). 

And since also the type information is an administrative security
consideration .. a network transparent administrable configuration
environment is about overloading schema's. Nothing more, nothing less.

Because .. what does a schema contain?

	- The default value
	- The type information
	- The description


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be