Gconf interface support

Hi,

Is there any plan to support gconf as an interface? I’m currently using a snap (guake-cl) to create a bash script that I run with guake-cl | sh. guake-cl’s output script contains gconf settings that update my guake-terminal’s colour-scheme, but I’d prefer if my snap-package could just set these directly.

From what I understand you support gsettings, but not gconf2, which is a pity as guake unfortunately uses gconf2.

Thanks for your help, if you need any clarification let me know

I think that not supporting it is a feature:

I wouldn’t claim that as a feature. It’s not an objective of snapcraft to push developers to use particular libraries.

FYI, a few applications have come in that are unable to be migrated so I’ve introduced a new, manually connected gconf2 interface: https://github.com/snapcore/snapd/pull/8870.

1 Like

Thanks for the update!

For what it is worth, it looks like Guake ported from GConf to GSettings with the 3.0.0 release in January 2018.

Given that the deprecation of GConf started over a decade ago now, I do wonder how much value there is in this interface. There is no guarantee that the backend service will be present on the host system, so it can’t reliably be used to store settings.

As mentioned in the PR, there have been several applications (some proprietary) that need gconf to work. The interface will not be auto-connected or otherwise promoted in desktop parts/extensions since, yes, people should migrate, but for old (perhaps proprietary, perhaps requiring old libs (seen at least twice with java applications)) software, this helps allow them to be snapped.

Furthermore, there are a number of implicitClassic interfaces that don’t guarantee a required dependency is installed; gconf would just be another on that list and it would be up to the snap publisher to appropriately notify the user in this case.