GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 649408
Keys without a schema can't be deleted
Last modified: 2018-02-09 09:22:15 UTC
There is no way to unset(remove) keys with dconf-editor. Unlike gconf xml format, dconf's file format is binary. Which means it is completely inaccessible without some form of editor.
The editor has a button to reset to the default value. At this point the key has been removed from the database. Most of the keys shown in the editor are from the schema. Those are not meant to be modified by users -- to get rid of them you essentially have to remove the package associated with them.
There are many entries that are optional, like launcher icons. In org.gnome.gnome-panel.layout.objects I have one object-{number} per launcher icon. In addition I have clock, menu-bar, notification-area, user-menu, window-list, and workspace-switcher. If I want to get rid of a launcher, how am I suppose to get rid of object-{number}? I might also want to get rid of say workspace-switcher. I understand it is schema based, but schema based is really the wrong model. It also really isn't being used in that way.
I think the bug here is keys without a schema can't be deleted, is that correct?
Yes, that is. When you delete a package, the keys still appear with a message "No schema". Would be interesting to delete these keys.
One should change the Summary to "keys without a schema can't be deleted"
Ildar: done. I would expect you could have done it yourself though or were you unsure about your choice of title ?
Geert: it's not hard to do that. But I'm a kind of "shy" making big changes to bugs I didn't report.
Ildar: that's fair. From you comment I thought you were a bug triager. Those people are used to improve on bugs that are not theirs. I just changed it because I saw no one dispute your suggestion (though I'm not a bug triager myself, at least not for the dconf project). Enough meta conversation. Hopefully someone will fix this missing functionality.
[moving dconf>editor tickets to dconf-editor product. See bug 744791]
*** Bug 664278 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 768145 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Removing keys entries that do not have a schema will be doable in the 3.22 version of dconf-editor (or whatever its name is at the release), that will be available in september. For now, there’s no “list of apparent orphans” (see dublicate bug 664278), but it probably will come in another release (I want to exclude keys that are known to have a relocatable schema).
I confirm it works. Time to close?
There’s no “big button to clean dconf database” for now, as notably suggested in duplicate bug 664278. But that’s more or less doable now (after the to-be-released 3.28), as we can finally map relocatable schemas to the wanted path(s). That “just” needs design… I opened bug 793326 to discuss about it, so closing here.