xffm settings and mcs

[Olivier Fourdan]

On Sat, 2003-05-10 at 07:42, edscott wilson garcia wrote:

> It was not difficult to exclude it from being saved, or even kept in
> memory. 


I think I know why I see many problems with the way xffm settings work
(or at least don't work the way I wish)

If I understand well, xffm and the mcs-plugin share the same
configuration file. That's no good at all.

When using mcs, the app must delegate the settings to mcs and just react
to value changes. The application can have and manage its own separate
configuration file, but not for the same purpose (think of xfce4-panel,
settings are stored in mcs, while menu contents aren't)

So, to make things right in xffm, I believe that xffm should not set or
read any params that are managed by mcs, and leave the mcs manager save
data on its own (just like all other tools do) - FYI mcs is able to save
an entire channel to an xml file and load it afterwards with a single
function call. Moreover, it doesn't depend on libxml2 at all.

xffm particularily has a lot to gain by using mcs: typically, many
different instances of xffm can be run on the same display, some on
different hosts, some on the same host. mcs will serve all instances
with the same settings, wherever they reside.

>From the application, having a "Edit->preferences" menu is just calling
mcs on the given plugin (exactly like xfce4-panel does)

Then comes the special cases like setting the "home dir". I think this
is wrong anyway, so I wouldn't mind see such things go away. Call it
differently, use the cmd line option to pass a base dir, but it's
definitely not a setting.

I think xffm would benefit a lot from such a cleanup.

Cheers,
-- 
Olivier Fourdan <fourdan at xfce.org>
http://www.xfce.org