list separator in config entries

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 08.10.07 08:09:26, Thomas Braxton wrote:
> On 10/8/07, Oswald Buddenhagen <ossi at kde.org> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> couldn't KConfigGroup just escape the escape chars, and if you want to
> change KEntryMap, I don't really see a problem, but can't that wait until
> after 4.0? It's not like we have any other backends right now.

Uhm, we can't change the API after 4.0, so removing the custom-separator
method is needed to be done _now_.

Andreas

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