[ale] Recovering FC11 default GNOME panel

[Michael Trausch]

On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 11:54 -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
> I'm quite aware of the gconftool-2 cli abilities. My gripe is and will
> likely continue that by having it centralized it makes the settings
> much harder to work with than is needed. By saving things in xml
> format it add a needless layer of textual beauracracy that is better
> handled by a well designed foo.conf.template file.

XML is just the default handler; gconf can use anything you want it to
use if you write the code to do it.  You can use anything from BDB files
to PostgreSQL, or anything else (even a flat Unix-style configuration
file if you want).  See
http://developer.gnome.org/feature/archive/gconf/gconf.html which
mentions this.  I don't have the link for the API for writing the
handlers handy at the moment, though.

> I am not a fan of xml. I don't see xml as _the_solution_ for all
> things data. Inheritable configuration settings do not require a
> cascading stylesheet of open/close tags. It encourages far too much
> replication of data (setting "foo" is used in both container "bar" and
> "baz" which are not related in anyway so <uses>foo</uses> must be
> entered twice when a simply foo=1 or foo=true would have sufficed). 

I agree with you wholeheartedly on this point.  However, it hasn't yet
bugged me enough to write a backend plugin for it.  It *works*, and
given the decent support for working with it, I treat the back-end as
opaque.  I don't care how it works, it *does* work (and pretty well).
That's all that matters to me.

Oh, and I'll take the way gconf works by default over a monolithic
binary blob any day of the week.  ;-)

	--- Mike

-- 
Even if their crude and anticompetitive business practices don't make
you think about using their software, their use of sweatshops and child
labor should:  boycott Microsoft like you would any other amoral child
abuser:  http://is.gd/btW8m

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20100518/60b94e34/attachment.bin