[Mageia-discuss] Gnome3 on Mageia 1

Wolfgang Bornath molch.b at googlemail.com
Tue Jun 7 11:08:11 CEST 2011


2011/6/7 Olav Vitters <olav at vitters.nl>:
> 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


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