Gnome and KDE Integration
From Elektra Initiative
Although not limited only to desktop applications, the problems addressed by Elektra are also related to FOSS desktop frameworks, and their relation to other frameworks and softwares. The adoption of Elektra by these frameworks means a complete integration between them in the configuration layer.
We can architecturally describe FOSS desktop frameworks as Gnome and KDE like this:
To summarize, they are separate projects, each with their own configuration strategies, and common global things like web proxy configurations is not shared. In addition, GUI programs that wants to fidelize with these frameworks have absolute no access to system or software configurations that don't use their same configuration strategy.
In a wide open context, we can say that these frameworks have a "proprietary" way to deal with their configurations: currently, it is simply impossible for them to share configurations and collaborate.
What we are planning for these desktop frameworks is not to completely switch their configuration layers, but to collaborate with them reimplementing their interfaces that deal with configurations. The tactics are:
- For Gnome: write a GConf backend based on Elektra
- For KDE: reimplement KConfig XT methods to be able to have configuration affairs with a key database
This way, high level applications won't need to be changed and Elektra will be a solid option for Gnome or KDE. Additionaly, they will gain instant and native configuration affairs to non-KDE and non-Gnome softwares as X.org, Samba, etc.
Example of some instant benefits are:
- Single web proxy configuration
- Single desktop properties configuration
- Any G-app can access any K-app configurations natively, and vice-versa
All configuration parameters should be software independent, so many different softwares can take advantage of the same parameters.
