config file soup was Re: Considering ConsoleKit and GSettings/DConf

[Trevor Saunders]

hi,

 chris, personally  my issue isn't with shell editing specifically
although I suspect that won't be fun (ever play with gconf?).  My real issue is
that i don't believe non text based configuration is ok, even if it does have a
good text based ui, although.  I don't see any reason anybody should have to
provide such a interface, we already have plenty, $EDITOR etc (the plan9 use
files for everything idea).  Also, I'm not
convinced of the flexibility / ability to work with out of tree modules.

 As for the client settings overiding system settings what I was planning to do
in opentts after I had managed to replace a select loop with a thread per client
modle was to then have the thread read in the user name that was sent's
configuration in on top of the system one read on initialization so the idea
would look something like this.

daemon starts reads /etc/speech-dispatcher
client connects sends user name "foo"  $HOme for user foo is gotten if possible
and .speech-dispatcher is read to set the settings local to that thread
overriding the global settings.
Trev

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 03:53:19PM -0500, Chris Brannon wrote:
> Bill Cox wrote:
> > I'll just point out that in Vinux today, users have to edit three
> > entirely separate sets of speech-dispatcher configuration files:
> > /etc/speech-dispatcher controls the instance of speech-dispatcher used
> > with speakup.  /var/lib/gdm/.speech-dispatcher controls GDM's copy of
> > speech-dispatcher at the login window.  And users control their own
> > Gnome instance with ~/.speech-dispatcher.
> 
> Yes, the config file situation is confusing.
> Personally, here's what I'd like to see: defaults that can be overridden
> on either a global or per-user basis.
> E.G., a user setting overrides a global setting, and a global setting
> overrides a default.
> Right now, there's no way to merge user and global settings.
> Either we read all of our settings from the user's config files, or we
> read all of them from the global config files.  It's all or nothing.
> As a user, you can't pick and choose which of the global settings you wish
> to override.  Does that make sense?
> I think we're both talking about the same thing.
> 
> I hope that the gsettings stuff will make things simpler, both from a user's
> perspective and a programmer's perspective.
> I'm sure that there is a way to manipulate gsettings values from
> the command-line, as well.
> 
> -- Chris
> 
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