Bug#456114: gconf: Please support splitting preferences into multiple files by path

Josh Triplett josh at freedesktop.org
Thu Dec 13 07:49:37 UTC 2007


Package: gconf
Severity: wishlist

I keep my home directory in version control, as a means of sharing it
across systems, keeping it backed up, and tracking changes to it.  I'd
like to add some of my gconf configuration to version control as well.
However, gconf contains various types of preferences, some of which I
want to version and some of which I do not.  For instance, I would
like to version /apps/metacity/general/num_workspaces,
/apps/evolution/mail/display/thread_list, and most of
/apps/gnome-terminal, but I do not want to version
/apps/evolution/last_version,
/apps/gnome-settings/gnome-panel/history-gnome-run, or
/apps/meld/window_size_{x,y}.

Thus, I'd like the ability to have multiple readwrite gconf stores,
with different (non-overlapping) sets of preferences stored in each.
I could then have all the prefs I want to version stored in one file,
machine-specific prefs stored in another file (bonus if I can use the
hostname in the filename, so all the machine-specific files can
coexist in parallel), all the prefs I never want to version in a file
to ignore, and all other prefs in a new file so I can check and
classify them.

This potentially shares some goals with online-prefs-sync, which would
also benefit from having a list of preferences safe to sync across
machines, and which provides some support for the idea of safely
changing a store underneath gconf and having it notice.  However, it
differs in several ways, most notably the use of local stores for
everything.

- Josh Triplett

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-rc4 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash






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