Mickael Marchand created a branch in KDE SVN to work on a KDE configuration storage system based SQL. This picks up the idea to have more ways in KDE to store the configuration than just having the file based way.
This idea to improve the current, INI-like file based storage system of KDE’s configurations was first made public by Aaron Seigo in January 2006. He suggested to use for a ldb which was/is used for Samba 4:
kde could get a centralizable, replicatable, scalable, fast and safe config storage system that can move us beyond ini-style configs without much work on our part. being able to store data in binary formats also means that we may find we get some performance boosts from not having to ascii-ize everything on the way out to the config file and repeat the process in reverse when reading it in.
As he later also made clear the idea was not to simply replace the current backend, but to write another one, to make them replaceable. And since kconfig was designed from the start as an API for different backends this idea was indeed quite realistic.
But nothing happened over the time until last Commit Digest’s Issue 72. There it was mentioned that Mickael started to work on a SQL backend:
API change in kconfig really basic SQL backend [...]
and, the SQL backend, just a basic sqlite one for now (not even checking for locks/nb of connexions/… etc)till now, I was able to get kconfigtest to success all tests with the DB backend, and was able to run kwrite, modifying options etc
Besides a maybe faster configuration backend this work will truly abstract the configuration system and will make it possible to write others. So if you want to configure KDE in future with configuration system xyz – just write a backend for it. Think of possibilities like Elektra.
