list separator in config entries

[Oswald Buddenhagen]

On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 01:22:02PM +0200, Andreas Hartmetz wrote:
> 2007/10/8, Oswald Buddenhagen <ossi at kde.org>:
> > the question is at which point lists are serialized and therefore
> > through how many escaping passes they go.
> >
> Ahem yes, I missed that.
> You are arguing for another refactoring of KConfig here which I assume
> was not your intention.
>
whoops. ;)

> I agree that we need to fix things right,
>
exactly.
if another refactoring is the price to pay, we need to bite the bullet.
note that this is only internal stuff, so it doesn't necessarily mean a
further delay.

> For the record: The refactoring would consist of moving list handling
> into the backend(s)
>
yes.
given that the windows registry can handle numerical values and blobs,
too, all of the type handling should move to the backends - the api
would only know qvariant, which would allow arbitrarily complex nesting
and leave complete freedom to the backend.
to support backends that don't provide arbitrary binary storage (in
particular, text-oriented backends like ini), a serialization
class/namespace would be provided to share code.
serializers for gui classes need to be somehow external ... hmmm,
actually, this is a generic problem if custom data structures should be
supported.

> > assuming that the spec is implemented only by people who know
> > anything about working escaping is pretty naive.
> >
> Programmers OTOH should know what they are doing.
>
the key is "should". particularly in the lesser known almost-one-man
projects the know-how is often missing. it's incredible how much crap is
out there. so it is crucial not to leave *anything* to interpretation in
a spec.

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