The Preferences Tree Guide Lines


Overview

The purpose of this document is to normalize the preference tree, so any application knows where to store or retrieve preferences.
This document is not complete, and is open to discussion.



The root section

The root section should not contain any entry, it should contains the following sub-sections:

/system
/applications
/shared


The /system section

This section is reserved for Be to store all the system preferences. It is the responsibility of Be to decide or not to publish the content of this section. Most if not all the data located in the /boot/system/settings folder should belong to this section (and its sub-sections).


The /applications section

It is where the applications should store their private preferences, this section should be normalized too, we propose that the application preferences should be stored in /applications/company_name/application_name. So for the application "WordProcessor" created by the company "ACME" the preferences should be stored in "applications/ACME/WordProcessor".
What is in the "WordProcessor" section is totally free to ACME.


The /shared section


This section should contains the entries supposed to be shared by applications, it can be the email of the user, its preferred home page, its www bookmarks etc...

Because those entries are shared their location have to be clearly defined and they have to be fully documented... And here is the problem, we need somebody (may be at Be :-) ) who will be responsible of maintaining the list of all the entries and sections of the /shared section...