On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:03 PM, Scott Granneman <[email protected]> wrote: > I guess my first question would be, why replace conf files?
You wouldn't necessarily have to replace conf files, just provide an API to them. That way you wouldn't have to edit the config files by hand. Instead you could do run a command. For example, let's say vi-conf was the tool that interacted with the vi config file. You could run this to query or change the number setting: $ vi-conf number number=false $ vi-conf number=true $ vi-conf number number=true $ vi-conf -a # to get a listing of all possible keys and valid values Since we are now using a database model for the config file, we would want to have full CRUD support. (BTW, the format for the above example was borrowed from sysctl). > They're ASCII, so they're readable & writable & scriptable by just about > anything. They're easily portable & copyable. Yes, but it would be nice to hide the implementation of the configuration file from actually using it. With an API you don't care how the configuration system is implemented. You just have a collection of methods/functions/commands which allow you to interact with it: create, read, update, delete. > They work. Just like tab-delimited files work as a database: up to a point. > The point being, Gconf was a bad idea to begin with. I'm not so sure. I think it would be nice to have an API to every application's configuration data. I suspect gconf was supposed to be a generic configuration database tool. > And on top of being a bad idea, it sounds like it was poorly implemented. Poorly implemented, maybe, poorly documented, definitely. Not so sure about bad idea. > Hey, now we're approaching Microsoft levels of incompetence! Well done. OS X does something similar, IIRC. For every application it has an XML file which is read/writeable via some generic configuration tool. I think that's a nice model in that the files are distributed (no single point of failure) and easily read/modified by other generic XML tools, yet has a single consistent configuration tool to query/update the data. At least I think it does. Haven't used a Mac in a while. Regards, - Robert -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug
