Application Settings for XFCE 4.6

[Alexandre Moreira]

On 3/7/07, Jasper Huijsmans <jasper at xfce.org> wrote:
> Alexandre Moreira wrote:
> > On 3/7/07, Masse Nicolas <masse_nicolas at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I know there was already a lot of discussion about replacing the mcs
> >> manager. But AFAIK no decision were taken, so I would just signal that
> >> I recently found something wich can be interesting in this area. Take a
> >> look at http://sacredspiral.co.uk/~nenolod/mcs/.
> >>
> >
> > It looks like a cool thing. I'll surely give it a try and see what is
> > it capable of.
> >
> > What about using it on Xfce... do you guys think this is feasible ? I
> > failed to find any good documentation on the system, unfortunately.
> >
> > Has anyone checked it out and came up with pros and cons ? I mean, it
> > really seems simple to use and useful but, can it handle what Xfce
> > need ?
> >
> No, someone interested in bringing this forward should try it out and
> tell us what it does and why we should use it (or why not).
>
>  From the sparse info on that website, it sounds like a configuration
> frontend, with a default GConf backend, which is probably not what we
> want ;-)

I did a slightly further check with it, and gave a look at its source
code. What I found out is:

It is a configuration front end with 2 default backends (GConf and
ini-like files) and an in development KDE Configuration one. It has
not much features: It simply allows applications to handle their
configs without thinking about the backends they use.

It has the concept of a default backend, set by a config file, which
can be modified in a global, per-user and per-application (using an
env var) basis.

I don't know what Xfce's MCS capabilities are, so I am not a good
person to discuss if it can fulfill Xfce's needs or not.

If anyone can list me what Xfce's needs are, I can check out whether
this can handle it or not.

By the way, the configs are defined with a pair of 3 strings: Domain
(the application name usually, set when we get a mcs context), Section
(at least I call it section because of the ini-like file), and Key
name.

It seems to be able to handle basic tree-like configs, such as Windows
Registry and Ini files, but I don't know how it would behave if we
needed some more complex hierarquical data, like some arbitrary XML.

It has no sort of config notification, so, if we need it we can rule it out.

I sent an e-mail to its creator asking about differentiation between
global configs and user configs.


Regards,
Alexandre Moreira.

>
>     Jasper
>
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