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

[Paul Benedict]

What about providing a shell script with JDK 9 with functions to encode
names? Users can then just "source" the file into their scripts and helper
functions available to them. Hopefully this would alleviate dealing with
special characters.


On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 8:22 AM, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com>wrote:

> 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
>



-- 
Cheers,
Paul