KConfigXT and kdeglobals - Linux Registry as option for 4.0 ?

[Frans Englich]

On Friday 03 September 2004 13:27, Scott Wheeler wrote:
> On Friday 03 September 2004 12:18, Helio Chissini de Castro wrote:
> > Ok, now people had oportunity to see how is made Linux Registry on
> > Akademy, so i ask if be considered to an option to KDE 4
>
> The ideas behind the Linux Registry are important -- in fact I think on of
> *the* important problems to be solved on the Linux desktop in the upcoming
> years will be a generalized settings mechanism.

As a programmer I do of course tear my hair out when looking at ~/.* or /etc, 
but I don't see how it affects desktop integration or open source 
advancement: It only looks ugly under the hood.(feel free to explain)
In that case I would rather spend time on DBUS/mime spec implementations or 
pushing W3C standards support in browsers.

Nevertheless, I think KDE API-users can be pretty ignorant since KConfig is 
well abstracted; it uses a simple structure of file/groups/keys, and that can 
be mapped to a lot of things. KConfig would be layered to support different 
backends; a MySQL database, LDAP, windows registry/whatever -- but API-users 
wouldn't have to care(and code wouldn't need to be upgraded; an incredible 
pain).

Throwing out a crazy idea I won't implement: Sometimes files are compressed 
for speeding up loading time; svgz is one example. Perhaps KConfig could 
conditionally compress large config files(reading would be ok, but writing 
tricky), if it's at all worth it..

>
> That said I don't think that the Linux Registry actually addresses any of
> the right problems in its implementation and doesn't have enough mindshare
> to actually be pervasive enough to be useful.
>
> For something like it to be successful it needs to be designed with input
> from a lot of people that are involved in various cross-system projects and
> with the real problems that they're having to solve in mind and to actually
> have enough buy-in from the people actually working on those projects. 
> Anything less just becomes yet-another-redundant-configuration-system.

As with all other major frameworks :)


Cheers,

		Frans