Miloslav Trmac wrote:
Not really. It is not that much harder to write the equivalent code without GConf. To support upgrades, the application must 1) be able to read the settings in the original format 2) convert them to the new format 3) write them back in the new format.
Reinventing the wheel is always a bad idea. Why force this ordeal upon each and every application, when a clear configuration management interface could be used instead by all of them?
2) doesn't depend on GConf availability.
But gconf (or any other equivalent) avoids the reinvention of the wheel by each and every application.
GConf helps with 1) and 3). Applications not GConf obviously already have 1). So the only difference is writing code that can write the current configuration as a configuration file (losing all comments in the process, exactly like GConf-using applications would).
Why lose the comments? A configuration management app can be purposefully created in such a way as to preserve even the comments.
Writing this code should really not be _that_ difficult.
Agreed, provided that it's written _once_.
When httpd changed the config format incompatibly and the httpd developers didn't write a config format converter, and when GNOME applications changed the used GConf schema and their developers did write a config format converter, the difference is mainly caused by the developer's decision, not by usage of GConf.
The developer's decisions will be greatly simplified if they had an external tool to handle all the configuration management issues. One less nuisance to bother with.
I wrote initially a longer message, but it's been edited a bit and I will post the rest in a separate message in this thread.
-- Florin Andrei http://florin.myip.org/ -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
