what is the relationship between .override files and .convert files used for overriding preferences using gschema?

Question

I observe that .convert files look similar to .override files. Override files end with .gschema.override suffix. I believe that gsettings-data-convert or any other utility creates the .override files. I am looking forward to any link that can explain the complete conversion process.

Answer 1

GSettings vendor overrides and .convert files for gsettings-data-convert are very different.

Vendor overrides are used to allow OS vendors (for example, a particular Linux distribution) to override the default values of settings shipped by an application or part of the desktop, without having to patch the code for that application. They are used quite commonly.

.convert files were historically used to map GConf keys to GSettings schema keys, so that data stored in GConf could be migrated to GSettings/dconf without manual migration code having to be written. Now that GConf has been deprecated since 2011 and unmaintained since 2013, the need for .convert files has dropped off. There should not really be any applications left using GConf (if they are, they need to migrate away from it ASAP). Hence you wouldn’t normally ever need to use a .convert file any more.