Introduction to GConf

Table of Contents
Motivation
Terms and Concepts

This chapter introduces GConf, including the basic terms and concepts. After reading it, if you're a GNOME programmer looking to dive in quickly, you might skip to the section called A Complete Example in the chapter called GtkObject Convenience Wrapper. If you want to have comprehensive knowledge of GConf, you might want to read the whole manual.


Motivation

GConf is intended to store key-value pairs, where keys are located in an infinite tree-structured namespace (similar to the UNIX filesystem). It offers several useful features:

GConf was inspired by Wichert Akkerman's configuration system specification, originally developed for the Debian project. See http://www.debian.org/~wakkerma/config6 for his specification. Other sources of ideas include the Windows registry, the ACAP specification, and Emacs customize mode (try typing M-x customize-browse in Emacs).