Re: Roadmap for GNOME 2.0

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, 1 Oct 1999, Tom Gilbert wrote:
> 
> One thing that people keep asking about is an easier way to
> standardise a gnome install across a multiple-user system.
> 
> By this they mean setting up an environement, and setting it as the
> default for all new users.
> 
> Has any work been done on this? It would keep the sysadmins happy ;-)
> 

GConf theoretically does this, but moving everything to GConf this quickly
could be very dangerous. Hard to say; I'm doing a little test suite to
make sure GConf is as stable as I can make it, but it's a fairly risky
change to port everything... so I would advocate porting just a few 
things, such as the gnome-preferences.h stuff.

These are the key things to be able to set up:

 - Default desktop icons
 - Default panel applets
 - Contents of the default session
 - Desktop background
 - mime type handlers and icons

Most of this can already be done, painfully. We can improve some of it
(like the panel applet defaults) with some kind of text config file
or something.

We need a system administrator's manual that describes how to do all this
in GNOME 1.0; the manual would also be a nice TODO list for 2.0 if it
included sections that said "in 1.0, this sucks."  Stuff to mention in the
manual would include gnome-config system defaults/overrides, setting up
the above-listed things, TCP wrappers with ORBit and other security
concerns, configuring gdm, etc., etc.

This would be a really nice project, especially if someone who actually
admins GNOME boxes had time to do it. 

Havoc