A mailinglist about dconf and a description of the current concept/design idea

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Fri, 2005-07-29 at 11:59 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> So it's not just about configuring your E-mail application and browser.
> 
> It's about making sure your car and personal data assistant will also
> receive your E-mails, IM messages and video conferencing without forcing
> the user into configuring hundreds of devices and duplicated settings
> (in the Utopical idea that we'll have wireless Internet in all the big
> cities of this world sooner or later).


Oh and I forgot to mention

DConf is also about

- Building an extremely lightning fast asynchrone version of what
GConf's daemon does.

- Begin extremely not bound to a specific technology. By that I mean
that the plan is to make every single technology dependency (including
D-BUS) easily replaceable. And implementing the entire solution
extremely modular.

- A clean ANSI C (but OO-style) API. Probably a lot like libgconf. And a
lot supported language bindings for it.

- Distributed configuration management for insanely large networks. We
plan to build the infrastructure to do this as a Apache2 module. But to
avoid network latency by letting every desktop read it's configuration
from a local persistent store (the infrastructure only distributes
updates to those stores that are deployed on the desktops).

- Environment neutral (desktop environment, platform and architecture).
A system that can be used on electronic devices. On PDAs and mobile
devices. On cellphones. Automated synchronization of configuration data
with such devices.


So it's not just only about the example that I made. 

I hope this shows why I had to decide (for me, personally) that "dconf
is a research project".


-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ X-Tend
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: vanhoof at x-tend.be
http://www.pvanhoof.be/