README tdeconf_update Version: 1.1 Author: Waldo Bastian , What it does ============ tdeconf_update is a tool designed to update config files. Over time applications sometimes need to rearrange the way configuration options are stored. Since such an update shouldn't influence the configuration options that the user has selected, the application must take care that the options stored in the old way will still be honored. What used to happen is that the application looks up both the old and the new configuration option and then decides which one to use. This method has several drawbacks: * The application may need to read more configuration files than strictly needed, resulting in a slower startup. * The application becomes bigger with code that will only be used once. tdeconf_update addresses these problems by offering a framework to update configuration files without adding code to the application itself. How it works ============ Applications can install so called "update files" under $TDEDIR/share/apps/tdeconf_update. An update file has ".upd" as extension and contains instructions for transferring/converting configuration information from one place to another. Updating the configuration happens automatically, either when KDE gets started or when kded detects a new update file in the above mentioned location. Update files are separated into sections. Each section has an Id. When a section describing a configuration change has been applied, the Id will be stored in the file "tdeconf_updaterc". This information is used to make sure that a configuration update is only performed once. If you overwrite an existing update file with a new version that contains a new section, only the update instructions from this extra section will be performed. File format of the update file ============================== Empty lines or lines that start with '#' are considered comments. Commas (,) are used to seperate fields and may not occur as part of any field and all of the keywords are case-sensitive, i.e. you cannot say "key" instead of "Key" for example. For the rest the file is parsed and executed sequentially from top to bottom. Each line can contain one entry. The following entries are recognized: Id= With identifying the group of update entries that follows. Once a group of entries have been applied, their is stored and this group of entries will not be applied again. File=, File= Specifies that configuration information is read from and written to . If you only specify , the information is read from as well as written to . Script=