title: GNOME configuration database type-inference
body: <p>My desktop is GNOME and I am programmatically changing its settings via Python.</p>
  
  <p>The database has simple value types, e.g. strings, ints, lists of strings, list of ints, ...</p>
  
  <p>A simple CLI tool to manipulate the data is gconftool-2, which returns values for keys using the <code>--get</code> option.</p>
  
  <p>I don't know to to infer the type from these values considering that I need to know the value when setting it back to something. Notice, in my schema, "8" is a string and 8 is an int, but they are both output as just 8 by gconftool-2.</p>
  
  <p>How would you go about doing this?</p>