xfconf GSettings backend

[Stephan Haller]

Hi @all,

first of all I want to congratulate you for the Xfce 4.12 release and to
thank you for all your hard work to make this release happen. It's
great :)

I spent the last hours of my coding time on another very small project
of mine because I needed a break of xfdashboard to revise the current
work I've done (started with multi-monitor support) and the roadmap.
This small project is called - I guess you know it already - xfconf
GSettings backend.


So far the project's progress is that it passes all tests of Glib 2.40
as defined at /gio/tests/gsettings.c in the sources and all stored
values are editable with xfconf's graphical editor
xfce4-settings-editor. But this backend is not really smart to get it
editable in the editor. It tries to find suitable GValue type for basic
GVariant types, e.g. booleans, integers, strings etc. and stores them in
xfconf with their native type. All other types like containers (e.g.
arrays) or more complex type (using maybe type etc.) are converted to
their GVariant's parsable string representation and then stored as
strings in xfconf. So they are still editable but you have to use the
GVariant textual value. Short said: They are serialized.

This is for me just a proof-of-concept so the code is not well
structured yet and also error handling have to be improved. Also the
backend missed two functions (subscribe and unsubscribe) but I don't
know what they are used for. The documentation is not very complete
about the virtual function of a GSettings backend. But maybe it is still
worth a look and try. The Git repository is at

https://github.com/gmc-holle/xfconf-gsettings-backend

Please let me know what you think about it and if it is ok for further
development or if it is better to drop it ;)

Regards,
Stephan