I don't use GNOME, but...

I don't use GNOME, but...

Posted Jan 28, 2010 15:03 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: I don't use GNOME, but... by cmccabe
Parent article: Stormy Peters: What should the GNOME Foundation accomplish in 2010?

Since I'm being a completionist, let me point out another thing. You forgot to mention another argument against text file configuration: configuration file size. A set of (binary) registry entries can be parsed more quickly than a large text file.

This became a real issue in KDE, as well, long ago; but taking the hit once per session is quite acceptable. So we have canonical textual configuration files, a fast-to-read binary cache in /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER/ksycoca (which can be completely nonportable, mmap()ed by its users directly), and a daemon which watches the textual configuration files and regenerates the cache whenever they change.

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