LinuxRegistry in Freedesktop & KDE

[Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett]

Hello guys.

Surfing in Freedesktop website I found a pointer to GConf as a interesting 
pointer a shared configuration system for Linux. Writing configuration tools 
for Linux will be a pain & hack until we have a consistent and common way to 
store configuration.

Searching for more technologies, made me land at  the Linux Registry project 
(http://registry.sf.net), by IBM employee Avi Alkalay.

I wonder why never heard of it before. After reading the site with lot of 
prejudice in my head (i always had prejudice with registries, so yeah please 
*go* read the FAQ in the site before replying this post ), I was impressed, 
as it is an elegant solution. File system based and uses plain text files.

(if you already read the site...)

I wonder why it doesn't have the exposure it should has. For freedesktop it 
would mean:
- as it is LGPL, small, simple, andit depends only on libc6/ld-linux it would 
be a common way for every kind of app to store its configuration.
- KDE could easily implement a KConfigBackend for this, storing apps groups 
and keys just wrapping LinuxRegistry inserting keys in 
system/sw/KDE/current/appname/group/key (ie: current being a symlink to 3.2)
- GConf, which is inviable for every kind of app (dependencies, and as being a 
daemon, not being available before /usr/lib is mounted) could implement its 
backend as a wrapper for it.
- Other agnostic apps could use the library directly.

After I read the site, I felt the need to at least make everyone hear about 
this project. I am very interested about hearing technical arguments about 
this. I am only subscribed to FD and KDE lists, so gnome guys please CC. (and 
sorry about my english)

Cheers
Duncan Mac-Vicar

--
kde/chile * kopete * duncan at kde.org