Comment 2 for bug 699813

The "syntax and semantics" have already been clearly defined, and the necessary APIs for working with them have already been implemented in libgeda (the EdaConfig class in the C API, and the (geda config) module in the Scheme API). They were released in 1.9.0.

The configuration is stored using the standard freedesktop.org key-value file format (http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec). There are system, user and per-project configuration files. If you are running gEDA/gaf 1.9.0 or a more recent git version, the `gaf config' tool can be used to inspect and modify the gEDA configuration (see `man gaf'). This may be a good solution for programs that wish to use the gEDA configuration store without implementing a full .desktop parser (e.g. shell scripts).