Re: Xfconf's new gsettings backend

[Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac@debian.org>]

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On Sat, 2018-12-29 at 04:08 -0500, Unit 193 wrote:
> > Is there something new on this? I'd like to make an upload to experimental,
> > but at one point it'd be nice to be able to test it without losing all the
> > settings in non Xfce apps.
> 
> I know of no upstream progress on this, or if they ever intend to do something 
> for it.  It's not exactly the same as MCS to Xfconf, since most of Xfce itself 
> doesn't even use gsettings, as far as I know just mousepad.

Yes but other applications runnning on an Xfce desktop are likely to use
gsettings. Those applications settings will suddenly be taken over by xfconf,
so we should make an effort to migrate those settings.
> 
> As far as accidental loss of settings, that's unlikely as one has to set the env 
> var still, and even then the old settings will remain intact, just unused. 
> Still not ideal, but not as unfortunate as it could be.

I might not be really clear, but I'm trying to see from an user point of view.
I don't think it makes sense to keep the environment variable indefinitely. At
one point, either we enable it globally, or we don't.

When we enable it, we decide that every gsetting ends up stored by xfconf. For
the users it should be transparent. That means they shouldn't one day log in
and see that half their applications have reset to their default settings and
they need to reconfigure everything.

As an example, on my laptop with Xfce I have:
gsettings list-recursively |wc -l
1582

I'd hate to have to migrate those manually.

By the way I just found a nice thread from 2015 on the matter: 
https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/2015-March/031193.html

Not sure where we stand on the migration to dconf but it's good to keep in
mind.

Regards,
- -- 
Yves-Alexis
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