Re: [eclipse-dev] Initial User Settings document

[Jeff McAffer <Jeff_McAffer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

This is great capture of usecases and scenarios.  Clearly user settings is one of those areas that looks simple but turns out to be very problematic.  I don't have much to add in the way of scenarios but do have some thoughts on the store...

- you mention an interest using XML values to support more than primitives.  Does this imply that you expect any part of the settings mechanism to interpret the values it manages?  To what end?  This would essentially mean unmarshalling the objects encoded in the XML and may prove to be quite difficult (unless you are spec'ing a marshaling DTD in which case, your crazy! :-).  I would suggest just storing strings.  If the string happened to be XML then whoever accesses the value can parse/unmarshal it.

- by unified settings store it is unclear if you mean that all settings would be stored in one store or that there will be one store mechanism and any given running Eclipse will be using several store instances for the differently scoped settings.  I am assuming/hoping for the latter.

- It may be interesting to allows others to supply implementations for the stores in various scopes.  In some enterprise scenarios for example, application preferences would be stored on a central server/database.  This may also help in controling sharing in the sense that the store for a particular scope of setting can dictate whether or not the settings in that scope are shared.

- Applications will have some security concerns wrt settings.  It is unclear if you actually have to do anything.  On the one hand you could say that the setting mechanism has security and people have to have the right permissions etc.  On the other you can just say that it is insecure and people who store valuable info there should encode it properly to prevent tampering.  The former is more work for you, the latter puts the work on the consumers.  Either way a security statement should be made.

- As an aside, OSGi (http://osgi.org) has a "user preference service" with a relatively simple store API .  Basically a hierarchical tree of keys/values(with primitive types I think).  As it is a service, the implementation is not specified or implied.  You might look at it when designing your store API.

Jeff

Michael Valenta/Ottawa/IBM@IBMCA Sent by: eclipse-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx 06/17/2003 12:06 PM Please respond to eclipse-dev

To:        platform-core-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx, eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx         cc:                 Subject:        [eclipse-dev] Initial User Settings document

The initial document describing user settings problem has been posted at the following URL: 

http://dev.eclipse.org/viewcvs/index.cgi/%7Echeckout%7E/platform-vcm-home/docs/online/team3.0/settings.html 

The term "user settings" can mean different things to different people so the first goal is to ensure all of the relevant scenarios are documented. If you know of a scenario that is not covered, please let me know either by annotating the bug report (https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=36965) or posting on the platform-core-dev mailing list (I have cross-posted to eclipse-dev because of the broad nature of the problem). Also, a first cut at defining a solution is also included so feel free to comment on that as well. 

Michael Valenta