Experiences with KDE-CVS at LinuxWorldExpo

[Waldo Bastian]

At 15:10 -0500 11/10/02, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>On Sun, Nov 10, 2002 at 04:04:20PM +0100, Marc Mutz wrote:
>If anyone is seriously interested in a server-based config solution, I
>should point out that I'm willing to strip all the CORBA dependencies
>etc. out of gconf, sync it to KDE release cycles in addition to GNOME
>release cycles, rename it, move it to shared CVS, whatever it takes.
>I wrote up some details on gconf and its role in this kind of central
>config setup, see http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2002/ proceedings (I
>think, haven't checked). The paper for OLS also contains some
>discussion of ACAP.

To solve the documentation problem I think schemas would indeed be a 
good solution but I would rather not have to read them during normal 
operation.  Config options are typically used in two places: in the 
application itself and in a config dialog. Currently in KDE defaults 
are hard-coded in the code (typically in multiple locations, which is 
a maintenance problem) I think it would be acceptable if schema's 
where used for the config dialog but in the application itself this 
causes rather unnecessary overhead IMO. To ensure consistency between 
the defaults defined in the schema and those used by the application, 
the application could optionally (e.g. when compiled with 
--enable-debug) run in verification mode where it reads the schema 
and verifies that the application does indeed use the same defaults. 
This could then be skipped in normal production use.

The other thing that concerns me is the communication overhead with a 
(local) daemon, does a GConf application make roundtrips to this 
daemon for every config-key it needs to lookup?

Cheers,
Waldo