JDK 9 RFC on 8029770: Improve user friendliness of preferences storage on Unix systems

[Alan Bateman]

On 11/03/2014 12:09, Peter Levart wrote:
> :
>
> What is the purpose of changing the scheme? Is it just to be more 
> power-user and developer friendly? To enable users to inspect the 
> preferences with filesystem tools? What about a little command-line 
> and/or gui "jprefs" tool in the style of regedit or gconftool or 
> similar? Would that be enough to satisfy the goal? Any of the options 
> A...D seem a compatibility nightmare for majority of programs that use 
> preferences. Most users don't ever inspect directories starting with 
> dot '.', so this feature is more or less targeted at developers, 
> right? A tool that is standard part of JRE distribution could do the 
> job of browsing (and perhaps changing of) the preferences without 
> compatibility concerns...
This is mostly about complaints from those with scripts that are forced 
to deal with special characters in the file name. I don't think the 
preferences API is used very much so it might not be worth doing 
anything. If it does change and it might need a tool to migrate existing 
preferences, all depends on the approach.

-Alan