Re: Old gconf keys (was: Tab width)

on Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 10:32:18AM +1100, Sridhar Dhanapalan ([email protected]) wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 09:21, Andrew Conkling <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 22:00 +0100, Michael Mauch wrote:
> > > Which brings up another question: who is supposed to clean such old keys
> > > from gconf? The application itsself? Or the distribution's package (how
> > > would the maintainer know which keys could be removed?)? Certainly it
> > > would be bad to delete the whole /apps/galeon tree everytime Galeon is
> > > updated.
> >
> > Ach, Windows registry!
> 
> I am sick and tired of hearing the assertion that gconf is like the Windows 
> registry. There is nothing inherently wrong with a centralised registry 
> system, and in fact it can deliver many benefits. 

Sure, just ask Microsoft:

    Rival Calls Microsoft Unready to Carry Out European Order
    By PAUL MELLER
    Published: March 23, 2005
    http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/23/technology/23soft.html

    RealNetworks said that Microsoft had deleted registry entries
    associated with media-playing functions in legacy MS Windows.
    Without the registry entries, Mr. Stewart said, rival media players
    installed in the second version of legacy MS Windows could not work
    with other applications like Word documents and some Web sites.

A similar story was carried in The Register:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/24/microsoft_ec_disagree/


Among the problems of a registry:

  - How do you comment out a given entry, or a range of entries, easily.
    In a textfile, prepending a comment character to the start of the
    line suffices.   Or how do you support extensive inline comments,
    readily, across a span of keys.  I'm in the habit of adding my name,
    a date, and a descriptive comment, within conffiles.  Or how about
    the (OK, debatable) elegance of something like Squid's conffile,
    which has *copious* documentation inline describing its contents.

  - How do you prevent one application from modifying another app's
    keys?  Don't think everything's going to play nice, particularly as
    commercial apps start using GNOME infrastructure.  Does gconf have
    an internal security model?  That accounts for different actions
    _within a single user context_ being untrusted?

  - How do you manage shared key data (say:  proxy config data).

  - How do you deal with apps parking obfuscated data in the registry?
    Look at Debian for a guide:  Policy states what can and cannot be
    done, and violations of policy are Release Critical bugs.  This
    means a package violating policy won't be included in stable
    release.  See my long-standing gripe against Evolution for its
    obfuscated encoding of start page weather/news source information.

    Policy without enforcement is worthless.

  - How do you deal with bloat (old settings, stale settings).  Treating
    gconf as a write-only repository...leads to its own problems.
    Messing up the cleanup process also has its downsides.

  - How do you trivially make before-after comparisons, to see what an
    installation or config change have done?

  - How do you clean up after something *does* eff-up a gconf file?

    
I'm not saying that gconf (and the Registry) don't have their benefits.
But there are some serious costs, many of these *are* common to both
gconf and the MS Windows Registry.  Naysaying doesn't make it otherwise.


> The problem is that Windows, with its shockingly poor implementation,
> has given the entire concept a bad name.

No:  the concept has some fundamental problems.  Microsoft embraced the
Registry in no small part because it's a vast pit of confusion from
which Microsoft could establish and extend its criminal monopoly abuse.

> I don't think it would be difficult for an app like Galeon to have a
> script which removes all gconf keys which aren't in its list of
> 'currently used' keys. That should fix the problem.

Sure.  Should take care of stripping out all comments.



Peace.

-- 
Karsten M. Self <[email protected]>        http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
 What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
    MX Radio - With Bob Edwards, who needs NPR?       http://www.xmradio.com/

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFCQrKWefG8443k044RAhmgAKCDhla9+27JArsKrqcyIgu0ZASLKACghhL5
fvzH6w8Q78Fj1f9TU10plVg=
=rC+z
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----