linux registry (no, not that again!)

[Daniel Veillard]

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 at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/