Re: Defaults

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 11 Oct 2004, at 18:19, Stefan Urbanek wrote:

> Hi,
>
> As I am moving from one computer to another I am experiencing some
> inconveniences. Is there any reason why is GNUstep defaults database
> hidden file? This prevents normal user with default file-manager
> settings to move his defaults, as they are not visible.
>
> Another thing is: it would be better to store defaults in one file per
> domain - this will allow to copy defaults from one machine to other,
> which is not quite possible now (it is not very easy and not doable by
> standard user).
>
> Also i would suggest to use Preferences, Settings or Configuration
> directory name instead of 'Defaults', but that is not so important.
>
> What do you say?

I would suggest that you use the 'defaults' command to do the job ...
since it has no problem reading from stdin and writing to stdout.

Depending on a particular file layout and/or data structure seems
unsafe to me ... what if something is modifying the defaults while
you copy the files?  What would you do if the defaults were stored via
LDAP in a relational database on another server for instance?

While I'm only slightly opposed to the file being visible, and would
actually be in favour of someone contributing code to separate domains 
into
different files (and/or use a database to hold the information), I don't
think people should be copying the files around.

That being said ... I just *tried* using the 'defaults' command to do 
the
job, and found that it failed with domain/default names containing 
spaces.
I have committed what I think is a fix to CVS.  Please let me know if 
anything
is broken.