Status of gconf -> dconf

[Colin Walters]

2009/2/23 Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com>:
>
> What is this, Windows? Everything is a file. Hey, I have a wild idea!
> Store your config in ~/.fooconfig/keyname, the contents being the value
> of the key. Wow, now you have hashed key lookups, locking (fcntl),
> change notification (inotify), permissions and ACLs...

This is the kind of design that makes kernel developers complain when
they strace applications and notice how many system calls they take to
start up.  Also, inotify has kernel limitations that would prevent us
from using it on that kind of scale.

"Everything is a file" was a cute mantra for the 1970s, but reality is
more complex than that.  As painful as it is, in general we've been
moving more underlying storage in the desktop to mmap()able formats
because it involves few system calls, doesn't take lots of file
descriptors (not an unlimited resource), and works well in the
multi-process architecture that for historical/political and some
technical reasons we have.

Don't get me wrong - GConf has some very bad design flaws (at least
should have used something like Protocol Buffers instead of XML), and
I'm not defending the weird dconf licensing.

But "let's just use lots of files" is not the answer.