Status of gconf -> dconf

[Callum Lerwick]

On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 11:23 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 13:47 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> 
> > As has been pointed out a couple of times, it's *not* always efficient
> > to use the filesystem, because the filesystem usually relies on block
> > sizes.  Thus you waste lots of space if your file is < 4k.
> 
> Has anyone quantified this at any point?
> 
> If 'lots of space' turns out to be 150MB, who the frick cares? I bought
> a 500GB hard disk for $60. It was the smallest one they sell any more. I
> bought an 8GB micro SD card - the size of a fricking fingernail - for
> $50 a couple of months back. Where are we actually dealing with space
> limitations any more? Not saying that there isn't somewhere, just that
> we need to quantify if block sizes are actually a practical problem for
> the use cases we're considering or not.

It's easy enough to run some numbers. Lets pull a big number out of a
hat, 10000 configuration keys. Lets assume a block size of 4k, and that
all key values are 4k or less. 10000 * 4k = 40000k, or ~39M. Or working
backwards, 150M = 153600k / 4 = 38400 keys.

Anyway, it was just an idea. I don't expect it to be suitable for
*every* purpose. It just annoys me that people so readily discount the
filesystem, only to just re-invent what is essentially a filesystem in
userspace *anyway*. And re-invent it badly. How many thousands of
man-years have gone in to researching filesystem design over the past,
what, 40 years? How many thousands of man years has gone in to
optimizing the Linux kernel and ext2/3/4 specifically? Do you really
think you can do better?
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