What Is Dconf, What Is Its Function, and How Do I Use It?
Mark Shuttleworth Recently Blogged About the Decision to Include the Qt Libraries in the 11.10 Release, with a Followup from Jono Bacon. Mark States That the...
Mark Shuttleworth recently blogged about the decision to include the Qt libraries in the 11.10 release, with a followup from Jono Bacon. Mark states that the biggest challenge to integrating apps written in Qt into the larger Ubuntu system is Qt's current non-compatibility with dconf.
What is dconf, and what is the role it plays in Ubuntu?
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Introduction
As other answers on this site discuss gconf and dconf together, I will just concentrate on discussing command-line tools such as gsettings and the gui dconf-editor that are used to access the dconf database.
At the GNOME official site it is noted that
dconf is a low-level configuration system. Its main purpose is to provide a backend to GSettings on platforms that don't already have configuration storage systems.
dconf is a simple key-based configuration system. Keys exist in an unstructured database (but it is intended that keys that logically belong together are grouped together).
Having all of the keys in a single compact binary format also avoids the intense fragmentation problems currently experienced by the tree-of-directories-of-xml-files approach.
dconf is optimised for reads. Typically, reading a key from dconf involves zero system calls and zero context switches. Writes are less optimised -- they traverse the bus and are handled by a "writer" -- a DBus service -- in the ordinary way.
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