Requirements and pre-analysis for a cross desktop configuration infrastructure

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 21:53 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> So, adding this little dialog after learning from Martijn Dekkers post.

And adding these dialog for after learning from the posts of Avery
Pennaruns and Jeffrey Vaughan.

> [CUT]
> 
> > Some "geeks" use a source control system for managing changes  in  their
> > home directory. I don't see this  as a  required  something  to support.
> > Perhaps the  ability  to  freeze  writing  to the backend so that backup
> > applications  can  instruct the configuration daemon not to write for a 
> > certain amount of time or until the unfreeze command is given.
> 
> However, It should be possible  to  scale  the  configuration management
> over multiple computers.  My  first thought on  this  is  that we should
> investigate whether ACAP is a suitable protocol for this. We  could  let
> daemons "communicate" with each other. Which of course implies that some
> sort of authentication  and  SSL  between those two daemons is necessary
> (we need to investigate how ACAP works, how to implement this, etcetera)

For  further  source  control  integration,   an API for   creating  and
restoring backups sounds necessary.  That  way  it will  be   easier for
people who do specialised things with configuration data, like utilising
source control systems, to make integration  with their  favorite source
control system happen. 

The backup-format shouldn't only be XML. XML isn't a  very  good  format
for  source-control.  An  example  backup-format  that  is  suitable for
source-control are ini-files or  ini-file  style  backups. Since  binary
data isn't going to be supported, it's doable to use that.

New tools like dconf-dump,  dconf-import  should  implement  that  API.
So that people who don't   want to  hack  their  source  control  system
have a command-line tool which they can use.


> [CUT]

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: philip dot vanhoof at cronos dot be
junk: philip dot vanhoof at gmail dot com
http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org