Hey Folks,
I've been thinking about this for the past few weeks, so I thought I'd send out
an email...
We need a way to store configuration data, but our current option (GConf) is
not very friendly to systems that do not posses the resources of modern
desktop. GConf is still dependent on CORBA for the IPC system, and has some
features we don't need such as value caching and "schema" support.
What we (probably) need:
A "hierarchical configuration system", which are just fancy words for a file
system paradigm.
This should be implemented as a "global" (probably per-user, per-session)
service. I think having a simple service ("daemon") that we can use different
backends with down the road is best. The obvious choice for implementation of
the service is DBUS.
My current plan is to implement this with the only dependencies being dbus and
glib for the daemon, and sqlite for the default datastore. (The datastore code
is already complete.)
Specific features:
"value" is defined as : a DBUS-style primitive or container type
(See: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html)
"string" will be null-terminated, UTF-8
"sub-tree" means a directory in the configuration data.
1) Store/Retrieve a value for a string key
2) Add/Remove a key sub-tree
3) Remove a key
4) Be notified when a key or sub-tree is changed, accessed, added, or removed
(which of these is really needed?)
5) Determine whether a key or sub-tree exists, or not
6) Iterate a sub-tree's keys
7) Some mechanism for key permissions: Determine whether a key is readable or
changeable , or not. And a way to change this as well.
Does anyone have anything they would like to edit on the features definition ?
More Thoughts:
I would like to know how other people feel about this before I proceed with
more coding.
Maybe we will want to try and push our solution back to the "mainstream" ?
While the GNOME project has yet to yield a good solution to this, I bet its on
the road map. As there is a lot of fragmenting going on in the embedded
GTK/GNOME world right now. (Maemo, Access (Palm), Poky, just to name a few..)
Having "competing" implementations being developed should be taken seriously.
As I think we want to stay with the rest of the Linux desktop as much as is
feasible.
How do people feel about key permissions, and how would this tie into our
security system ?
To be clear, I (and anyone who wanted to help of course!) would be implementing
this. I'm not trying to pawn a project off on somebody else. :-P
Feel free to email me, or grab me on IRC.
Sorry for the ramble,
Cody
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