Anarcat: Moving dconf entries to git

I've been managing my UNIX $HOME repository with version control for almost two decades now (first under CVS, then with git). Once in a while, I find a little hack to make this work better.

Today, it's dconf/gsettings, or more specifically, Workrave that I want to put in git. I noticed my laptop was extremely annoying compared with my office workstation and realized I never figured out how to write Workrave's configuration to git. The reason is that its configuration is stored in dconf, a binary database format, but, blissfully, I had forgotten about this and tried to figure out where the heck its config was.

I was about to give up when I re-remembered this, when I figured I would just do a quick search ("dconf commit to git") and that brought me to Josh Triplett's Debconf 14 talk about this exact topic. The slides are... a little terse, but I could figure out the gist of it. The key is to change the DCONF_PROFILE environment to point to a new config file (say in your .bashrc):

export DCONF_PROFILE=$HOME/.config/dconf/profile

That file (~/.config/dconf/profile) should be created with the following content:

user-db:user
service-db:keyfile/user

1. The first line is the default: store everything in this huge binary file.

2. The second is the magic: it stores configuration in a precious text file, in .config/dconf/user.txt specifically.

Then the last step was to migrate config between the two. For that I need a third config file, a DCONF_PROFILE that has only the text database so settings are forcibly written there, say ~/.config/dconf/profile-edit:

service-db:keyfile/user

And then I can migrate my workrave configuration with:

gsettings list-recursively org.workrave | while read schema key val ; do DCONF_PROFILE=~/.config/dconf/profile-edit gsettings set "$schema" "$key" "$val" ; done

Of course, a bunch of those settings are garbage and do not differ from the default. Unfortuantely, there doesn't seem to be a way to tell gsettings to only list non-default settings, so I had to do things by hand from there, by comparing my generated config with:

DCONF_PROFILE=/dev/null gsettings list-recursively org.workrave

I finally ended up with the following user.txt, which is now my workrave config:

[org/workrave/timers/daily-limit]
snooze=1800
limit=25200

[org/workrave/timers/micro-pause]
auto-reset=10
snooze=150
limit=900

[org/workrave/timers/rest-break]
auto-reset=600
snooze=1800
limit=10800

[org/workrave/breaks/micro-pause]
max-preludes=0

That's a nice setup: "YOLO" settings end up in the binary database that I don't care about tracking in git, and a precious few snowflakes get tracked in a text file. Triplett also made a command to change settings in the text file, but I don't think I need to bother with that. It's more critical to copy settings between the two, in my experience, as I rarely have this moment: "oh I know exactly the key setting I want to change and i'll write it down". What actually happens is that I'm making a change in a GUI and later realize it should be synchronized over.

(It looks like Triplett does have a tool to do those diffs and transitions, but unfortunately git://joshtriplett.org/git/home doesn't respond at this time so I can't find that source code.)

Now if only Firefox bookmarks were reasonable again...

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