The Case for Gconf

XML is text markup.

It makes them unnecessarily bloated, hierarchical, difficult to read, edit and validate.

OK, you've stated a position. Anybody can do that.

The gconf authors explicitly made it so you could write your own back-ends. It's perfectly possible to write some code to hook up gconf to your Oracle RDBMS if that's what you want.

If you really think using an RDBMS would be less bloated and easier to read and edit, well, go code it and prove it to us. The fact that it's stored in XML works fine for me -- and just about everybody else, it seems -- so you're going to have to actually write something better if you want it changed. (I used Gnome for years before learning that configuration is stored in XML. I don't know why anybody would care.)

As for "bloated", my entire gconf tree is ... 3 MB. That's less than 0.05% of my (ancient!) 9 GB disk. It's also a fraction of the size of any music file or photo I have. Well, except maybe some short 10-second music tracks.

(If you're doing embedded work, it seems fairly big, but if you're putting Gnome on an embedded system, you need to do a lot of hand-trimming, anyway.)