2011/6/7 Olav Vitters <[email protected]>: > On Tue, Jun 07, 2011 at 10:33:42AM +0200, Wolfgang Bornath wrote: >> My personal killer of Gnome3 is the switch from normal editable >> configuration files to a kind of registry, to be edited with a special >> editor. This is a no-go. Normal text files for configuration is one of >> the common basics of Linux (and most *nix based systems). Each rescue >> system, be it as small as possible comes with a text editor (I've >> never seen any system without vi) to edit configuration files and thus >> mend a broken system. This will not be possible with Gnome3. >> Correct me if I'm wrong, but this was what the Gnome people told me in >> Berlin. > > Glib has had gsettings for a while. The default backend is 'dconf'; it > uses binary files to store configuration values as to *greatly* speed up > reads (and thus your login). > > Before gsettings, we had XML files, which you can indeed change, but > only when GNOME is not running. Doing that while GNOME was running will > likely break stuff. The way to interact with them was 'gconftool-2'; not > by using an editor. > > In any case, gsettings is not GNOME 3 specific. Run e.g.: > gsettings list-schemas > to see what programs already have been using gsettings on your system. > > The port to gsettings happened during the last few GNOME 2.x releases, > so it is not GNOME 3 specific and you're likely using it already. > > FWIW, if you personally do not want to use the dconf backend, you can > choose something else using the GSETTINGS_BACKEND environment variable. > E.g. 'gconf' exists. Although it is perfectly usable, suggest to stick > with things that everyone else uses; less likely to encounter > bugs/problems.
Ok, all this was new for me. I am but an occasional user of Gnome and I automatically assumed that Gnome has the same basic paradigms as all the rest of Linux. If this is not the case then it's not Gnome3 I will stay away from but Gnome in general. Thx for enlightening me. -- wobo
