On Oct 13, 2014, at 10:30 AM, Morten Johan Sørvig <[email protected]> 
wrote:

> 
>> On 10 Oct 2014, at 13:27, Ziller Eike <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Oct 10, 2014, at 11:48 AM, Morten Johan Sørvig <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> Mac people: do we need access to plist files?
>>>> 
>>>> Plist is the format for application and other settings on OS X, and there 
>>>> are native tools for nicely editing these. Ini is highly alien on OS X.
>>>> So, I’d answer yes.
>>> 
>>> On the other hand, git uses the ini file format for the config files also 
>>> on OS X.
>> 
>> git is a command line tool, and used by a very specific audience.
>> 
>>> I see this as two separate use cases: 
>>> 1) Cross-platform API for managing application settings.
>> 
>> We regularly have people which complain that Qt Creator application settings 
>> do not follow platform convention on OS X, because they do not find a qt 
>> creator plist in ~/Library/Preferences, or actually there is one that 
>> contains some settings coming from Qt (NSNavLastRootDirectory, 
>> PMPrintingExpandedState...., some WebKit stuff, and a few more), but not the 
>> actual application settings.
>> 
>>> 2) API for reading native settings, following the conventions of the 
>>> platform
>> 
>> What kind of native settings are you thinking about here (on OS X)?
> 
> If I may re-state my point it is that OS X settings is more than the Plist 
> file format: NSUserDefaults has special behaviors for sandboxing, iCloud 
> sync, the iOS Settings app, etc. Perhaps the best way to use NSUserDefaults 
> from a Qt app is QUrl::toNSURL() and QString::toNSString() (i.e. enable it 
> don’t wrap it).
> 
> In that light supporting ini+json only is a project with a well-defined small 
> scope. Creating a class that wraps the native  settings is a much larger 
> project.

Ok, right, if it is feasible to wrap such "native settings” in a cross-platform 
API at all.

So, from my perspective (1) should be able to generate something that users 
expect from an application they install (on OS X that’s a plist in 
~/Library/Preferences),
and (2) is nothing we should aim for (at least not at the moment, and since 
this seems even conceptionally different on different platforms, I’m not sure 
that at all).

Br, Eike

-- 
Eike Ziller, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
Digia Germany GmbH, Rudower Chaussee 13, D-12489 Berlin
Geschäftsführer: Mika Pälsi, Juha Varelius, Anja Wasenius
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Berlin. Registergericht: Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 
144331 B 

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