Requirements and pre-analysis for a cross desktop configuration infrastructure

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 22:42 +0100, Lars Hallberg wrote:
> Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> >But "dconf-dump" and "dconf-import" wont be the only way to do this. My
> >(our) plans are to create an API in  libdconf. The tools "dconf-dump"
> >and "dconf-import" will just use this API just like any application
> >could. Including your integration-plugin for CVS and/or SVN.
  

> If D-CONF get the cascading feuturs right, this API can be used easy to 
> add featurs like network transperancy also, ie, that need not be part of 
> 'core' D-CONF.

I've posted a .dia file which you can find here that gives an overview
of the current architectural idea (you'll need to rename if using the
URL):

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/attachments/20050317/d618db2e/D-Conf.bin

Network transparency and scalability would be, in that idea, done using
the ACAP protocol specification. But thats, of course, just idea's and
whether ACAP is suitable for this purpose needs to be investigated.

The backup/restore features would be used for another purpose: Keeping
versions of changes of your configurations. You probably won't do that
for every single host on your huge network of hosts. You will probably
do that for groups. And you will probably push a specific version of the
configuration to the configuration systems of the hosts of a specific
group. And for that purpose you'll need the network transparency. And I
can imagine one would like to create a bunch of servers that will make
sure each host in each group has the correct settings. And I can imagine
that one likes to use a source control system to manage differences
between groups and versions.

I don't think it would be wise to integrate this version control within
D-Conf itself. I do think it should be possible to integrate D-Conf with
existing source control systems. Therefor my proposals to have extensive
support for creating backups and merging/importing dumps.



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
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http://www.freax.be, http://www.freax.eu.org