Elektra backend for KDE

[Avi Alkalay]

On 2/21/06, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Monday 20 February 2006 11:16, Avi Alkalay wrote:
> > See, Elektra can provide to KDE to be capability to manage not only KDE's
> > or desktop applications, but access to any other system's function
> > configuration, because Elektra was designed to be systemwide.
>
> ... at the expense of insane complexity and amounts of indirection IMHO. but
> for something that must read everything, that's probably unavoidable.

Well, I'm not sure I understand that. But there is no insane
complexity or amount on indirections in Elektra. And Elektra does not
read things like xorg.conf files. It patches X.org to read
configurations from it, instead of xorg.conf.


> this is why i personally am of the opinion that elektra will be useful for KDE
> apps for bridging to things like X.org's config, but not particularly useful
> for either servers such as Samba or KDE's own configurations.

OK, but I didn't understand yet how KConfig was architected to work
with multiple backends. Just because it defines an interface class and
an implementation class (very thight in the semantic, btw) doesn't
mean it support multiple backends. I couldn't find a backend factory,
and how a default backend is selected. I appreciate explanations on
that.


> in the former, directory services are where i believe we ought to be pressing
> forward to (for the sake of admins everywhere, and because that's what the
> market (aka "people writing servers") have arrived at already).

Well, I'm not an LDAP specialist, but as far as I know, just to
provide an hierarchy to store values don't make them a configuration
system. Actualy, they where not designed for that. I understand them
as hierarchical databases that most subtrees have the same shape
(translated into schemas, in the LDAP terminology).


> in the latter, we don't need the overhead of kconfig->elektra->INI when we can
> just go straight to INI.

Well, there is no INI in Elekra, and just seeing the drawbacks doesn't
help much, because Unix configurations is a problem much broader than
just the overhead of non standarization of configuration files.

Aaron, did you used the playground interfaces or the mainstrem code in
to write your ldb backend?

Regards,
Avi