System- and Desktop-Conf (Re: D-Conf)

[C. Gatzemeier]

Yeah, depending from where you look at it, there are quite some differnces, 
I've come to think.

Desktop programing types may have a nice API, a good feature set and one 
back-end as goal for the d-conf in mind.

Sysadmin programing types (with interest for GUI/desktop support) may have 
unintrusive support for many apps (file formats/semantics/backends) and easy 
(or automatic) config-GUI generation as goals for the S-conf in mind. 
Changing the backend (/etc/*)of many/all apps is probably not on the 
wishlist, even less moving to a non-human-readable text file based approach.


Am Monday 07 March 2005 15:28 schrieb Joerg Barfurth:

> But if you have a frontend framework and a unified api for the actual
> parsing, generating and activation, then building a useful GUI for
> another system becomes much easier and may in many cases be done in a
> declarative fashion without requiring a C programmer.

Also much of the ever ongoing backend maintance work can be avoided and 
distributed! when files/semantics are also defined in a declarative 
non-hardcoded fashion. And that is part of the Config4GNU concept that has 
those things you state explicitly in mind. If you're interested, you can find 
more about it at
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CFG and
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/CfgFAQ

I've come to think though, that a "D-Conf" and "S-Conf" System will probably 
not be integrated. At least very unlikely right from the start.

Christian