[Gaim-devel] Configuration API

[<ni...@te...>]

After some chat in the IRC channel, I've set myself the mission of 
trying to improve the configuration system.

Currenty, gaim has a configuration system which seems to have the 
following main goals:

* Instant setting activation.
* Minimum *bit* overhead.

I'd like to remove the second goal. What I propose is a system where 
each pref has a name, and it's retrieved with a function. My idea would 
be to model the system to be similar to gconf, so that it gconf support 
can be a ./configure option.

The API could resemble this:

gboolean get_bool_pref(GQuark pref);
void set_bool_pref(GQuark pref, gboolean value);

GQuark is a way to be able to optimize things. It's like an "atom" in 
other systems. It can be viewed as a string.

The pref names (represented by GQuark's) would be hierarchical:

/sound/nice_sounds
/misc/debug_window

(In gconf they would be prepended with /apps/gaim ).

There would be a system which will enable parts of gaim to register some 
function pointer to be called when a property changes. As the most 
important use for this would be to update a local variable, I propose an 
API like this one:

gboolean myProp;
int handle = track_bool_pref(GQuark pref, &myProp);
while( ... ) {
	// we use myProp a lot here
}
dont_track_pref(handle);

When using gconf this will allow instant change of things when somebody 
edits prefs with a gconf editor. Avoiding the overhead of querying the 
pref each time the user types a key.

For the not-gconf version I would use two GData variables. One for the 
pref values ("all_prefs") and one for the default pref values 
("all_default_prefs"). The getter functions would first query 
"all_prefs", and then fallback to "all_default_prefs". This way there 
could be buttons to reset prefs to "factory defaults" (they will just 
remove the value in "all_prefs"). And the prefs which are not touched 
will be able to change between gaim versions. But if the user has edited 
the pref, then it would override the default (until the user reset the 
pref).

Having an API like this one will make very easy other improvements, like 
smarter gaimrc saving.

Well.. any thoughts? I must go now, bye! =)