On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 11:44:42AM -0400, David Malcolm wrote: > On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 14:11 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote: > > On mer, 2004-07-28 at 10:18 -0500, W. Michael Petullo wrote: > > > > > Also, as mentioned by someone else before, GConf has some interesting > > > capabilities. As I understand, GConf also promised eventual multiple > > > backends. > > > > GConf promised to be a registry that avoided the maintenance problems of > > binary backends using XML. What the GConf people forgot is XML *can* be > > used to create human-readable and editable files (see fontconfig) but > > this requires some developer love to be true. > > > > It's especially sad to see an app like evolution (which is supposed to > > be coded by elite Gnome people) abuse gconf files in so many ways > > they're almost as bad as a serialised binary blobs. > > > > (take a look at .gconf/apps/evolution/mail/%gconf.xml if you don't know > > what I'm talking about). > > It's XML stored as a string key inside the GConf backend, so you get XML > escaped inside XML. Reminds me alarmingly of RSS :-( > > Still, it's not quite as bad as a binary blob - at least you have a > snowball's chance in hell of figuring it out. > > I hope I can get this fixed for Evolution 2.2 I don't see the problem. If that piece of XML need to be stored in gconf it's just fine. The fact that the serialization looks taht way is not a problem in that case. Contrary to RSS, gconf is not about sharing structured content but about an API to a persistant storage, nothing need to be fixed there, it's like storing a template in a database, your database API is "load/store text" then on top of it you apply the specific semantic for the specific case where that text is XML. Daniel -- Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/ veillard@xxxxxxxxxx | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/ http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
