XSETTINGS unfit as configuration mechanism?

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Hi all,

I'm not completely sure on this one so please correct me if I'm wrong.

I have been reading the specification and sample code for the xsettings
standard to see if we can use it for global xfce settings. As I understand
it the app changing the settings must be the the selection manager.

This means we need to control all xsettings also non-xfce ones (most
importantly for us the "Gtk/..." and "Net/..." ones like font choice and
double click time). ROX-Session has an implementation for this. We can use
that as a starting point and add our own settings to it. It seems only
logical to combine the xsettings manager with session management so we could
turn the app into xfsession.

However, this would also mean that we cannot change the global settings for
the panel or wm or another xfprogram when the user is running a different
environment. I'm not sure that this is a good thing.

I've only recently learned a bit about xproperties and client messages so I
might be writing complete nonsense here, but I'll try anyway if only to
start a discussion.

Maybe it's better to have our own xfsettings manager with its own setting
window that uses properties for the settings (I thought not using the root
window was a bit nicer, but we could use that as well). I think this makes
it easier to change them from a separate program compared to this manager
selection thing that I really don't understand.

The goal of all this and the reason why I don't propose to just let all the
programs do their own configuration is that I think it would be nice to have
a style manager / control center type of program to configure the entire
desktop. In that case we need a communication mechanism between the
configuration program and the applications it configures.

Ones again let me state that I'm not a professional programmer and there are
so many things I don't know or don't understand about interprocess
communication that there may very well be a much better and more obvious
solution to the configuration problem.

Finally, I though about suggesting to use GConf, which was designed with
this purpose in mind, but that would make us depend on CORBA, which I don't
think is in the spirit of the project.

What do you think?

greetings,
	Jasper

PS
This must be the longest e-mail I have ever written ;-)