Gconf or GSettings? - leading to a wider question

[Lubomir I. Ivanov]

On 19 January 2013 10:56, Amit Chaudhuri <amit.k.chaudhuri at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Two different lines of though bring me to ask the same question.  Namely,
> why does subsurface use Gtk2 and not the newer version?
>

i've heard that gtk3 uses cairo and the widget rendering is very unoptimized.
also that their API changes so often that your application may not run
between minor updates.

what i can say for certain is that there is no official GTK3 for
windows, which makes it non-portable.

> The most recent trigger was a quick look at GconfClient usage within the
> current code.  Docs pretty quickly lead you to things implying
> deprecation/migration to GSettings etc.
>
> I have no particular axe to grind here, but ** if ** there is a plan to
> adopt the newer technology it would be as well to be aware.  Likewise, if
> the project is avoiding same for good reason....
>

honestly the configuration should be "configuration library agnostic"...
but also using platform specific methods isn't exactly a good call
either (windows registry).
subsurface already uses a library and format that is so often used for
configuration and that is libxml / xml.
there isn't a requirement to store megabytes worth of information, but
only 30 entries or so...
and given the nature of the software it can hardly grow to a 100.
if a lot of data has to be stored, it can be in binary using different logic.

but using platform specific methods to load these 30 entries is a bad
call, while libxml is portable.
everything else can end up as a difficult to maintain overhead.

lubomir
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