Re: linux registry (no, not that again!)

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm redhat com>]

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