Dconf Madness

I needed to compare dconf settings. There are oodles of online references how to dump the contents of the dconf dataabase.

    dconf dump / > user.txt

Really, that’s all there is to do. The resulting file is a familiar INI structured text file. The contents are not sorted in any sane manner but that is not part of this discussion.

The idea of dumping the contents is to make changes to the file and restore the contents as a dconf database. Again, oodles of examples online.

    dconf load / < user.txt

Except this command repeatedly failed for me. Exasperating.

Then I noticed the stdout of the command. A clue. Loading only works when run inside an X environment.

At that point I successfully restored the dconf database.

I'm sorry. There is something fundamentally wrong when developers design software like this.

As one well known writer often quipped, “I'm not making this up!”

Posted: March 22, 2020 Category: Usability Tagged: General

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