>I was thinking a bit broader than that.

Me too. Quite a few weeks ago, this was a little dream of some KDE
developers
in #kde on irc.kde.org.

With a colleauge of mine, we wanted to go a few steps further and to create
an abstract information storage system. With information I refer to any
kind of information that can be stored anywhere. Examples: configuration
options, mails, calendar data, notes and more.

For each information, different states must be defined, for example, if the
information is shareable to other users or if the information is a private
information. For efficency, I suggest to create "information groups" where
all necessary information which belongs together is stored. For example,
you have got mail settings. The information "user name", "password", 
"pop-servers", "smtp-servers" belong to the group "email settings/personal",
but the mail contents itself (mail folders) belong to other groups (which
could be "email/folders/inbox". It should also be possible to create
multiple instances of a group, for example, to store your email settings
at work AND at home on the same single server, but the appearance of
your mail client should be the same. Furthermore, a single group could be 
shared to other users (with different access privilegies, of course ;).
Single information entries must be defined as machine-specific or 
machine independant. If multiple instances of information groups are found,
the user should be provided with the option which information he/she likes
to use. There should also be a clear-text description of each configuration
entry and the possibility to take information out of multiple instances
of the same configuration (e.g. take information A out of group B, instance
C
plus information B out of group B, instance D).

It would even better if we had a nice, easy-to-use platform independant
API around this. I would love to logon to a macintosh machine where
all my settings I use on other OS'es in MacOS. This would also be helpful
for system administrators, where they can store a complete machine 
configuration on a server (only the configration, not the files themselves!)
and restore such a configuration in minutes.

I haven't looked into LDAP yet, but it seems that it can handle such stuff.
I'm not quite sure about sharing and multiple instances tough.

So what we need is a cross-platform API which can exactly do this. Consider
this as a complete overblast, but I bet the technology development wants
this.
It would be even cooler if we can get this into some kind of standard
proposal
(I don't think RFC's are the right way, but I don't know exactly). Think of
all this not as KDE-specific nor Unix-specific, but as a global standard
(like
TCP/IP is today). Consider myself as paranoid, but until everything works
as expected and many manufacturers/application developers/OS'es support
this,
we have the technical infrastructure to do this. We just need to start
development
now, or it's too late, because I believe that many propitary solutions come
out
(or are already out).

Yours
Timo
 
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