Re: [eclipse-dev] Initial User Settings document

["Michael Valenta" <Michael_Valenta@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Philippe,

Please see comments below

Philippe P Mulet/France/IBM@IBMFR Sent by: eclipse-dev-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx 19/06/2003 06:11 AM Please respond to eclipse-dev

To:        eclipse-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx         cc:                 Subject:        Re: [eclipse-dev] Initial User Settings document

I share Jeff's opinion on XML values. If some value cannot be decoded,
then
the client can react more appropriately (for instance surface a more
informative error : "unable to read classpath") than some generic
facility.

MV>>Good point. I still don't like the single
line for all preferences because of the reasons I stated in my response
to Jeff. Perhaps it is enough to support preferences can span mulitple
lines or live in their own file.

Modes are highly desirable. The document captures them really well.

One thing to keep in mind with sharing settings is to keep some degree
of
separation of concerns. Unless some smart comparison tool is provided to
reconcile changes to shared settings, then it is better to keep them in
separate files, e.g. .classpath file and .project files are separate.
However, as you described, some generalized facility to achieve this would
be more than welcome. Our thinking was that there could be some metadata
folder inside the project tree which would be shared. This area would
encapsulate all these concerns (which could go beyond user settings).

MV>>The shared metadata folder was exactly what
I was thinking of as well. I apologize for not be clearer on this point
in the doc. I was also thinking that the .classpath file could be a setting
that happens to live in it's own file in the metadata area.

One minor clarification. Not only Java compiler settings are stored into
the workspace metadata area by the JDT(Core) plugin. All JDT/Core tooling
options are stored in there. This includes formatter and codeassist
preferences.




                    
                     
                     
                     
                     
                     
             
                    
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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                
                     
                     
   
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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





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