Re: [ANNOUNCE] Many updated RPMs 9/2/99

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

"Chris Jones" <chris@black-sun.co.uk> writes:

> Hi
> 
> > If you are using gnome-libs 1.0.16 and are having problems with
> icons on
> > your desktop, delete ~/.gnome/metadata.db and restart your session. 
> 
> > 
> > You will lose your desktop icons, you can recreate the defaults by
> right
> > clicking on the desktop and choosing "Recreate Desktop Shortcuts".
> 
> It seems to me that this would be the sort of thing that should be
> done automagically when you install the rpm.

> If gmc were to expose some of it's functionality externally from the
> shell (i.e. the recreate desktop icons function), a simple
> post-install script in the rpm could probably handle this.

Actually, it's very hard to do this sort of thing in an RPM's
post-install because it is dealing with user data. A user
might have metadata on a homedirectory that is NFS mounted
on demand and not mounted when the RPM is installed, for
example. 

The only thing to do for an upgrade path would be
convert-on-the-fly. ("Hmmmm, I can't read this metadata database,
let me call gnome-converyt-metadta on it").

However, in this case, the short-term fix may be to re-add the
patch that made gnome-libs use db1 back to Dax's SRPMs. It was 
basically only accidentally removed. (Because it was
accidentally added into the main tarball for 1.0.15 then backed
out.) I've suggested this to Dax. 

> BTW, are there any plans for scripting language support in GNOME? I
> really SERIOUSLY suggest it.

The idea is to script against CORBA interfaces that programs
expose. This will be possible once people get their act together
and write interpreted bindings for ORBit for things like
Python and Perl. (Yeah, yeah, that's me for Perl)

Regards,
                                        Owen