Archive GConf?

[Xi Ruoyao]

GConf is only referred by pidgin, seamonkey, and emacs now. Is GConf really useful for them?

[Bruce Dubbs]

I don't see a way to disable GConf in pidgin. There are several of calls to gconftool-2. That said, pidgin is a gtk2 based app and itself a candidate for archival.

GConf is optional in emacs. configure says "--with-gconf compile with Gconf support (Gsettings replaces this)" I'm not sure is this means gsettings-desktop-schemas, but if it does, I'm fine with making GConf external here.

GConf is optional in seamonkey. In mozconfig we have:

# Comment out following option if you have gconf installed
ac_add_options --disable-gconf

I suggest leaving gconf alone for now and wait to re-evaluate at the next seamonkey release which is expected fairly soon.

[Xi Ruoyao]

Replying to Bruce Dubbs:

I don't see a way to disable GConf in pidgin. There are several of calls to gconftool-2. That said, pidgin is a gtk2 based app and itself a candidate for archival.

But in the page GConf is in optional dependencies, instead of required or recommended.

[pierre]

In /etc/xdg/autostart, there is a file gsettings-data-convert.desktop, which is installed by gconf itself, and which converts any gconf data to gsettings. This is for applications that install gconf data, so that they have their configuration converted to gsettings. So to my understanding, we have to find which packages (if any) install gconf data. If there are none, gconf is not needed, I'd say.

[pierre]

Reading the code of pidgin, if the programs finds gsettings in PATH, then it does not use GConf...

[Xi Ruoyao]

I guess today most usage of GConf should be replaced by gsettings.

[pierre]

I really think we can safely archive gconf... There is only one schema in /usr/share/GConf/schema, and it is installed by gconf itself. Furthermore, I've checked that pidgin builds and runs without gconf installed.

[pierre]

In /etc/gconf, pidgin installs some files if gconftool-2 is present, but it does not install those if it does not find gconftool-2, and it runs ok anyway.

[Bruce Dubbs]

gsettings is installed by glib. That is in the required/recommended chain for all the packages discussed here.

I agree that we can archive GConf. The only question is whether we just remove it from the dependencies in these packages or put it in as an external dependency. I lean towards a clean removal.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Nobody else seems to want to do this, so I will.

[Bruce Dubbs]

Fixed at commit 18454ac7