[ Thanks to Jeff Waugh for this
link. ]
“For users the big benefit is dynamic, instantaneous
update of all apps when a preference is modified; i.e., it gives us
instant-apply for prefs dialogs for free, even if the setting
affects many processes.Oh, also GConf will hopefully help out with the issue of running
multiple GNOME sessions sharing a home directory. There’s more work
to be done here though. Right now it wouldn’t work so well
out-of-the-box because we disable CORBA connections over TCP by
default, for example.The biggest win is probably for sysadmins, although that won’t
be fully realized until we have the admin tool and some backend
that’s really scalable for being shared between multiple
machines.Anyhow, I think the main step forward for GNOME 2 will be
getting some wide usage of the GConf API in GNOME applications.
Then enhancements to the backend will be much more interesting,
since more apps will be affected. So I’d like to see apps porting
to use GConf, and in particular I’d like to see us installing
schema files describing all config keys.”