On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 14:11 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
On mer, 2004-07-28 at 10:18 -0500, W. Michael Petullo wrote:
> Also, as mentioned by someone else before, GConf has some interesting
> capabilities. As I understand, GConf also promised eventual multiple
> backends.
GConf promised to be a registry that avoided the maintenance problems of
binary backends using XML. What the GConf people forgot is XML *can* be
used to create human-readable and editable files (see fontconfig) but
this requires some developer love to be true.
It's especially sad to see an app like evolution (which is supposed to
be coded by elite Gnome people) abuse gconf files in so many ways
they're almost as bad as a serialised binary blobs.
(take a look at .gconf/apps/evolution/mail/%gconf.xml if you don't know
what I'm talking about).
It's XML stored as a string key inside the GConf backend, so you get XML
escaped inside XML. Reminds me alarmingly of RSS :-(
Still, it's not quite as bad as a binary blob - at least you have a
snowball's chance in hell of figuring it out.
I hope I can get this fixed for Evolution 2.2