xffm settings and mcs

[edscott wilson garcia]

Hi Olivier,

El sáb, 10-05-2003 a las 08:10, Olivier Fourdan escribió:
> 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)

I see. Except that there are some settings that the user may want to
apply to either a single xffm instance, or apply to all running xffm
instances whether the owner of the xfce-mcs process owns all the xffm
processes or not. The only shared configuration items between xffm and
mcs are icontheme and iconsize (Although Danny's suggestion today
implies sharing more of them).

> 
> 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.

It would make life easier. The get_config/write_config would be
simplified by removing iconsize and icontheme from the xfce-mcs manager,
but, see below.... 

> 
> 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.

This is where things get complicated. I suppose some users would like to
have the same theme and icon size for all xffm instances. But I do not.
I use different themes and sizes for different users and hosts. That way
I can tell at a glance whether "root" or "edscott" owns xffm or whether
it's running on "sagitario" or "huitzilopochtli". 

In order to leave open both possibilities, iconsize and icontheme are
currently managed from both xffm and mcs. If you change configuration
from mcs, it will affect all instances. If you do it from xffm, it will
only affect the user and machine of that particular xffm.

> 
> >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 believe you have two different things confused. Using the command line
to pass a base_dir is not the "home_dir" in the settings. The home_dir
sets the directory which xffm goes to when the "home" button (or
keyboard ctrl-home) is pressed. If no base dir is specified it will
default to home_dir. The base dir is only used once at startup and, as
you noted, is not a setting. I think the mix up is due to the fact that
some time ago there was a xffm-bug where specifying the base_dir would
set the home_dir to base_dir, but that was fixed, AFAIK. 

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

I regard the double funtionality for iconsize and icontheme as a bonus.
But if you think the double functionality should be removed, that will be 
easy to accomplish.I would keep the setting from within xffm, since that 
is the one I use the most. Let me know if ---after all my explanations---
you're still convinced iconsize and icontheme should be removed from the 
mcs and I will proceed accordingly.

saludos,

Edscott



> Cheers,
> -- 
> Olivier Fourdan <fourdan at xfce.org>
> http://www.xfce.org
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Xfce4-dev mailing list
> Xfce4-dev at xfce.org
> http://moongroup.com/mailman/listinfo/xfce4-dev
>