[Mageia-discuss] Gnome3 on Mageia 1

Olav Vitters olav at vitters.nl
Tue Jun 7 10:57:29 CEST 2011


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.
-- 
Regards,
Olav


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