-12

About the fsync bug Theodore wrote:
"[...] The final solution, is we need properly written applications and desktop libraries. The proper way of doing this sort of thing is not to have hundreds of tiny files in private ~/.gnome2* and ~/.kde2* directories. Instead, the answer is to use a proper small database like sqllite for application registries, but fixed up so that it allocates and releases space for its database in chunks, and that it uses fdatawrite() instead of fsync() to guarantee that data is written on disk. [....]"

What about it?
Can't find a place where it's discussed...

This would be possible by creating a KConfig backend, then configuring KDE to use it ( somehow )

If you get a corrupted database, you lose everything. It happens under Windows. Plasma crashed last night (again) and messed up its configuration. Thankfully it only messed up Plasma configs. If it had been a binary database handling everything, I would have lost all configuration. Theodore is a kernel developer, not a GUI or application developer. His expertise lies elsewhere. There's absolutely no reason why an application can't have its own configuration file.

And don't forget the ease of modifying single text files like it is currently used.

Well, working with a database (f.e. sqlite) is
- faster than working with many single files (undisputable)
- safer: sqlite is transactional, a database is the state of art in terms of data recovery and consistency.

Well, I understand that one might want to edit the .config manually, but i suspect this happens for a short type of settings.
Who changes a panel position editing a text file?

Another example:

Suppose compositing in kwin is enabled, but the session doesn't start up anymore. You need to disable the compositing section in the kwinrc file.
On command line very fast and easy.

dodosoft wrote:Well, working with a database (f.e. sqlite) is
- faster than working with many single files (undisputable)

Well, I would say that depends. Somehow I doubt most programs would need to work with more than one or two rc-files. And a user is unlikely to do something like "update whatever_field in kde4 where uuid=0;" or something similar.

dodosoft wrote:Who changes a panel position editing a text file?

Probably few, but plain textfiles are much more convenient if something goes astray. I don't want a replication of the potential of a corrupted registry in KDE (or a kconf, it's bad enough to have gconf for gnome-apps).

It doesn't matter anyway, since it is possible to have many different backends to KConfig, although only one exists at this time.

It is not at all obvious that the way Ext4 does things is actually good. There is an ongoing (and quite entertaining) discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list. For a summary and especially Linus's criticism, see http://www.h-online.com/open/Kernel-dev ... ews/112937