linux registry (no, not that again!)

[Daniel Veillard]

On Tue, Aug 03, 2004 at 06:07:11PM +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> It's not - one of the selling points of gconf was it was "better" than
> the windows registry because it used a text backend and people could fix
> stuff manually using their preferred text editor when they had to.
> 
> (and BTW I didn't find those files because I wanted to shame anyone but
> because I had to perform such a manual fix myself).
> 
> People *explicitely* asked for something that was not accessed using
> only some special APIS ie gconf is *not* a black-box storage where you
> put stuff in random format just because it's convenient.
> 
> That piece of XML is largely un-editable be it in vi, emacs or even
> gconf-editor. It is a problem (_now_).

  It is not binary. It is editable in case of problem, but you have
to understand the data being stored and why it's that way. Sorry
to me this is still fullfilling the initial goal. This is escaping
not binarization, the rule is simple.
  Would you suggest that only French text be stored as gconf strings
because that's the only ones users would be able to understand and fix ?
No this doesn't make sense. Same argument in this case, if you're minimally
fluent in XML then why it's escaped and how to fix it if needed is 
possible.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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