During the last days/weeks I’ve been working on the desktop configuration specification. Yesterday I decided to convert the document to XHTML. This makes it even more easy for potential contributors to join the effort of creating this specification.
With the document I got to the point where I’m about to say: “this my proposal”, “what do you want me to adjust and/or do different”? So I’m seeking comments and/or suggestions.
The freedesktop.org organisation told me that they’d like to see a rough implementation first (replace fd.o with Daniel if you want it to be 100% correct). They will, however, assist me with facilities like repository hosting, a mailing list for a committee that decides about shareable keys and a wiki page once that first implementation is finished. The specification might also become a recommendation by the freedesktop organisation. The requirement, however, is that there needs to be a first a rough implementation first. The main reason for holding back is that specifications tend to change a lot during the development of a first implementation. I don’t disagree with this.
Therefore I invite interested people to read the proposal. Perhaps even help me make corrections (I’m sure there’s plenty of errors in the document at this moment). Perhaps even help me implementing a rough first implementation and/or adjust an existing infrastructure (like KConfig or GConf). Or build a new infrastructure. Or help with any imaginable use for this specification. One could, for example, adapt GConf or KConfig. Or even make a code generator like KConfigXT that uses the schemas defined by this specification. There’s a lot of work if you too want to make this standard happen (just ask me for it! :p).
One direction that will be taken is extending this specification (and implementing an implementation) with an add-on to make remote desktop configuration data management reality. At my company we will be looking into this. We are already doing an analysis about this subject. I will/might publicise a document with this analysis soon. I can already tell that it will most likely implement JEP 0072 (SOAP over XMPP) for remote notification of pushed changes and SOAP over https for transferring data. But all this is highly unfinished and uncertain at this moment. We welcome participants and/or teams that are interested. As a Linux consultancy company, our plans are to release this project using the GPL license (note that it doesn’t exist at this moment, we are doing analysis).