On Mon, 2009-02-23 at 17:17 -0500, Colin Walters wrote: > 2009/2/23 Callum Lerwick <seg@xxxxxxxxxx>: > > > > What is this, Windows? Everything is a file. Hey, I have a wild idea! > > Store your config in ~/.fooconfig/keyname, the contents being the value > > of the key. Wow, now you have hashed key lookups, locking (fcntl), > > change notification (inotify), permissions and ACLs... > > This is the kind of design that makes kernel developers complain when > they strace applications and notice how many system calls they take to > start up. Also, inotify has kernel limitations that would prevent us > from using it on that kind of scale. > > "Everything is a file" was a cute mantra for the 1970s, but reality is > more complex than that. As painful as it is, in general we've been > moving more underlying storage in the desktop to mmap()able formats > because it involves few system calls, doesn't take lots of file > descriptors (not an unlimited resource), and works well in the > multi-process architecture that for historical/political and some > technical reasons we have. > > Don't get me wrong - GConf has some very bad design flaws (at least > should have used something like Protocol Buffers instead of XML), and > I'm not defending the weird dconf licensing. To be fair - a lot of the new mechanisms for storing config data don't work with the filesystems commonly in use. NFSv3, AFS, cifs are 3 that come to mind as NOT playing well with sqlite, in particular. I think we need to be very careful in designing future config formats to realize that the world is: 1. not a single user on a laptop/desktop 2. very commonly using shared filespaces - especially for homedirs -sv -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
