gconf or not gconf ?

Michael 'Mickey' Lauer mickey at vanille-media.de
Mon Jun 9 00:08:59 CEST 2008


On Friday 06 June 2008 13:39:13 Jan Lübbe wrote:
> I'm CCing Ryan Lortie (developer of dconf). For Ryan:
> Openmoko is currently looking for a framework-wide configuration
> server/api. Do you think we should use dconf (instead of gconf-dbus or
> something new)?
>
> On Fri, 2008-06-06 at 16:36 +0800, Guillaume Chereau wrote:
> > On the other hand, gconf doesn't have a dbus interface, which is quite
> > annoying when all the other freesmartphone services do. There is a
> > project called gconf-dbus
> > (http://developer.imendio.com/projects/misc/gconf-dbus) but as far as I
> > understand, it doesn't provide a d-bus api, but just internally uses
> > d-bus instead of CORBA to communicate with the gconf daemon.
>
> Here's a thread that seems relevant:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gconf-list/2007-September/msg00000.html
>
> In summary:
> * GConf currently uses ORBit2 and seems to be deprecated
> * There is a port to D-Bus (which you mentioned above)
> * Current development is focused on dconf (http://live.gnome.org/dconf)
>
> > I am not used to gconf, so I can't decide if it is a good thing or not.
> >
> > So what would you like to have :
> > a) just gconf ?
> > b) a dbus interface to gconf ? (that may be a little overkill, the flow
> > would be like this : app -> dbus daemon -> dbus2gconf -> gconf)
> > c) an other conf manager ?
> > d) something totally new ?
>
> I've had short look at dconf and i seems like something we could use.

I agree with Jan. Guillaume, please take a deep look into dconf and its dbus 
API and find out whether it's ready for prime time. We might get away with 
basing on that.

See also Ryan's mail that for some reason didn't make it to the list (I guess 
non-member moderation, sorry Ryan).

Ryan wrote:
>On Fri, 2008-06-06 at 13:39 +0200, Jan Lübbe wrote:
>> I'm CCing Ryan Lortie (developer of dconf). For Ryan:
>> Openmoko is currently looking for a framework-wide configuration
>> server/api. Do you think we should use dconf (instead of gconf-dbus or
>> something new)?

>Thanks for writing about this.

>Depending on your timeframe, dconf is very possibly the right choice for
>you.  I hope you also looked at the GSettings API since this is a much
>nicer option for application developers.

>Since you've probably already read about the technical issues about how
>this will all work, I'll give a bit of a summary of the status:

>It's currently under somewhat heavy development so it won't be
>immediately ready.  I'm not sure I can give an estimation on when it
>will "be ready" -- it's one of those things where the final 10% is
>taking most of the time.

>Just these past days I'm finishing up a large set of changes to the
>value system (GVariant) on which this will all be based.  Due to some
>outside requests not related to dconf, this part of the project ended up
>being somewhat more complex than originally anticipated.  Once I move
>back to hacking on dconf itself, work should move more rapidly.  The
>code there is mostly complete, but needs to be 'adjusted' for the
>changes in GVariant.

>After that, I will move on to the GSettings stuff, where substantial
>code remains to be written (with respect to schemas, etc).

>Things are fairly API stable for GVariant and dconf, but there will
>almost certainly be small changes when proposed for inclusion in glib.
>There will probably be some more moderate changes to the GSettings APIs
>but the flavour will remain the same.

>In any case, except for a small test suite, there is nobody testing the
>code.  Any efforts in this direction would be greatly appreciated and
>help to improve my sense of confidence towards getting ready to merge.

>I hope this provides some useful information.  If you have any
>questions, you know where to send them :)

:M:
-- 
Dr. Michael 'Mickey' Lauer | IT-Freelancer | http://www.vanille-media.de



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