why are gconf schemas installed into /etc

[Erich Schubert <erich@debian.org>]

Hi,
I was just wondering, why gconf schemas are installed into /etc ?
IMHO they should be installed into /var and not be considered conffiles.

A slight modification to gconf -
appending   xml:readonly:/var/lib/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults
to the configuration file   /etc/gconf/2/path
- and there is no drawback for the user (except maybe for a slight speed
decrease due to the additional lookup, although i don't know gconf
internals deeply enough. I guess it will usually be just a cached file
not found by the kernel) - the administrator can add system-defaults
(opposed to distribution-defaults) to /etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults  as
always, and especially without risking to lose them during upgrades.

Depending on the behaviour of  "gconftool-2 --get-default-source"
packages would probably not need modification of their postinst scripts.
Otherwise i would suggest writing a "debian-install-gconf" helper which
will install the .schema file into the proper location.
This helper could then also get a function --reinstall-all to fix a
broken gconf database by deleting the tree and re-extracting all .schema
files in /etc/gconf/schemas.
(the gconf policy should then disallow modification of the
/var/lib/gconf trees except by .schema files in the correct location)

Has this been considered for debian before and what are the drawbacks?

Is there some "uninstall" function for gconf schemas? Right now i guess
that many packages will either not uninstall their schema even when
purged (gnome-applets doesn't do this in .postrm or .prerm, and the
extracted schemata are not listed as conffiles either) or will just
brute-force "rm -r" a subtree (like galeon, which assumes no other
application will store configuration in apps/galeon. ;-) )

the --reinstall-all function could help here (although ugly and
inefficient)

Greetings,
Erich Schubert
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