How to handle settings efficiently?

[SkyzohKey]

So, it would be nice to have a way to get/set settings in Ricin, I think using a database would be over-head for this. I searched a way to do it properly and had an idea that was also proposed at irungentoo/toxcore#1487.

Problem to solve:

An user should be able to switch to another computer only by saving it's profile file and then download Ricin and import this profile file. The issue here is that if the user only copy it's profile, he'll loose the settings from the first computer.

Potential solution:

A .txz, sort of tar.gz-like. It would contains the following files:

- example.txz
  |- example.tox   // This is the user .tox file.
  |- settings.json // Here we would store settings as json.
  |- aliases.json // The friend's profiles.
  |- Any other standardized datafile...

All of what the client should do is to extract the file in memory and get the file at the inside, then update them and rezip the file.

Note:

Ricin must provide a button to export the user .tox file to a conventional format. It just need to extract the user profile from the .txz archive to the extract path.

References:

irungentoo/toxcore#1487 (comment)

[dunielpls]

Perhaps SQLite and/or some JSON/YAML file. I see no reason to do it using .txz over, for example, just using a .tox file (or something else) like µTox/qTox and others do.

[SkyzohKey]

Ricin uses Libconfig since #54 get merged, this issue can be closed, so.

[SkyzohKey]

Reopened and updated the issue.

[mkody]

I like the idea of an archive. And 👍 for json, it's nice to keep things "human-friendly".

Does that mean that the example.txz is constantly updated or only when we click an export button or exit the client?
Using dropbox/owncloud for syncing could be interesting with this, but if I start running two instances of Ricin (because I'm booting my laptop for example) this could make some conflicts if they're not reading the archive back every time.

[SkyzohKey]

This issue has been inactive for several months now, thus closing.
In the future, feel free to create a new issue instead of keeping posting to this one.