General questions/conjectures about DBUS etc.

[Ray Andrews]

On 24/03/12 04:29 PM, Kevin Chadwick wrote:
> On Fri, 23 Mar 2012 21:29:19 +0000
> Chris Green wrote:
>
>> With my recent problems relating to automount (or not) and some other
>> things (running Calibre in particular) I'm wondering if all the reliance
>> on DBUS etc, for inter-process communication is breaking 'proper' X.
> Whilst IPC has it's uses. I have to say it is overused. Firefox
> demands dbus for writing a simple config file causing unnecessary
> problems for sandboxing. Over-engineered config file methods like
> dconf, gconf also seem pointless over the classic simple and reliable
> not to mention easily findable .[program name] files. Really what do
> they gain us, speed and space, for tiny files? oh and an apparently
> highly useful common format.
>
> rant over, sorry
Actually I wanted to rant about that a bit myself ;-)
I'm too new to this to speak with any force, but I have been wondering 
why config files have this strange ".xml" format. There must be a good 
reason to do things in a way that is, to first appearances, so 
complicated, but I'd sure like to know what it is.  I like manually 
editing config files, I find it much faster and more powerful than using 
GUI applets, but when the format is so strange, manual editing is a bit 
scary.  For example, I have this little utility I wrote for moving my 
mouse pointer around via KB shortcuts that normally uses 10 shortcuts. I 
added one the approved way, noted the change in the shortcuts config 
file and then just added the rest by direct edit:

<property name="<Alt>1" type="string" value="movemouse -g1"/>
<property name="<Alt>2" type="string" value="movemouse -g2"/>
<property name="<Alt>3" type="string" value="movemouse -g3"/>
<property name="<Alt>4" type="string" value="movemouse -g4"/>
<property name="<Alt>5" type="string" value="movemouse -cg5"/>
<property name="<Alt>6" type="string" value="movemouse -s1"/>
<property name="<Alt>7" type="string" value="movemouse -s2"/>
<property name="<Alt>8" type="string" value="movemouse -s3"/>
<property name="<Alt>9" type="string" value="movemouse -s4"/>
<property name="<Alt>0" type="string" value="movemouse -s5"/>

...

But I hafta ask myself why that can't just be a simple '<keyword> 
<value>' system, and what all the '.xml' stuff accomplishes. Why not:

<Alt>1   "movemouse -g1"
<Alt>2   "movemouse -g2"
etc.

When I had to accomplish the same thing in Gnome/Metacity it was a 
nightmare; Xfce4 made it much easier, but I'd still like to know why it 
can't be even easier than it is now.