[Adium-devl] Using NSUserDefaults for preferences (or not)

[Colin Barrett]

On Apr 4, 2006, at 4:47 PM, Evan Schoenberg wrote:

>
> On Apr 4, 2006, at 3:41 PM, Colin Barrett wrote:
>
>> Here are a couple of thoughts:
>>
>>  - What if you had a separate user defaults file for each group?  
>> com.adiumX.adiumX.contacts, for example.
> It might be better, certainly... though that Contacts group  
> (ByObject) is way too big to be grouped together even without the  
> much much smaller Accounts and global preference files.  I hesitate  
> to clutter the user's Preferences folder with my (*counts*) 1000 or  
> more different contact/group/metacontact plist entries [I have  
> 1,967 plists in my ByObject folder...]
>
> I don't think it's possible with NSUserDefaults.  The underlying  
> CFPreferences API probably allows it, but I haven't investigated it  
> much... I hate staring at CF code though we can roll that way if we  
> need to :)

CF code really isn't that bad. It could be regular C code ;)

>>  - Can we convert our current implementation over to binary plists?
> Easily.  Instead of using -[NSDictionary writeToFile:] and - 
> [NSDictionary(AIDictionaryAdditions)  
> dictionaryAtPath:withName:create:] we'd use implementations using  
> NSPropertyListSerialization.I'm confused by Apple's documentation  
> on binary plists... they flat-out recommend using XML plists (as we  
> currently do) and then use binary plists for NSUserDefaults.  Any  
> idea what advantages/disadvantages are?

Toby might be able to answer this. Toby, if you're around, what are  
your thoughts?

>> I have a couple general questions about the prefs system too. How  
>> bad is it, right now? Does it need cleaning up? I know this code  
>> is some of the oldest in Adium, I think it's a good idea to at  
>> least do a small audit of the state of things in there.
> It's old, but I overhauled it not that long ago ([[9134]).  I've  
> been all over it while doing this NSUserDefaults experiment and it  
> still seems pretty good.

Cool. I figure since we're in here giving it the run down, lets make  
sure it works well.

>
> David wrote:
>> ByObject will be able to get *much* smaller for 1.0. We're storing
>> message history info in there, which 1.0 doesn't use.
>
> Should be easy to filter out the message history in the upgrade  
> code -- I'll try that later, or you're welcome to beat me to it --  
> and see what  the result looks like.  I'm still hesitant about  
> using a system which won't scale; what do we do 5 years from now  
> when dude has talked to 10,000 contacts and all the tiny preference  
> data adds up.  Furthermore, a plugin tapping into the preferences  
> system shouldn't be able to wreck runtime performance havoc just by  
> storing large preference information "to disk" via  
> AIPrefernceController.

I'm not sure what you mean by "scale" in this case. I agree about the  
second point though.

-Colin