Imitation is the best form of flattery. It's just a shame for the people who paid $us80 that it's much older (and much buggier) than the version in Hoary.

Or, you could go over to Linspire Five-O! and grab a fork of xorg_6.8.1-0.3, which was made back in early November 2004 (as opposed to Libranet's effort of February 2005). There have been a few tweaks and fixes (entirely imported from Red Hat and SuSE, which Ubuntu have already picked up, if they work), but really not much value add.

Aaron writes about the stupidity of DConf. To be honest, I haven't been following the DConf discussions very closely at all, so I can't really comment in any useful way on the proposed standard, the people pushing it, whatever. All I can say is that fd.o is currently two machines with a couple of people have root on, that happens to run some reasonably popular lists. Anyone can subscribe and post, so what one person says, or a few people say, on xdg, might not be reflective of the opinion of the people who will be implementing and integrating whichever technology finally comes about. I don't doubt that a useful technology will come out of this -- if DConf is a failure, so be it. I'm sure that if it is, then something useful will be borne of its ashes.

That being said, I think if any good standard comes about, it will be a very good thing. I think the goal is worthwhile enough to persist with any bumps that may come along the way. But then again, I'm just hot-airing on a couple of planets, not writing any code, so take my views with the appropriate grain of salt. :)