Re: Desktop (GConf?): support for per-system user settings

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 01:45 +0000, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> Andreas raised an interesting question, regarding the gconf settings
> (sure, personal user settings) which are bound to the system in some
> way (for users using same net-mounted $HOME on different systems):
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150435
> 
> So, here is the question: does GNOME have some unified way/policy of
> keeping the settings which are essentially per-system? If users share
> $HOME between different systems - currently gconf exposes the same
> tree of configuration parameters, whatsoever. I think it is GConf
> responsibility - to provide "global" and "per-system" settings
> separately.
> 
> What do you think, people? Any comments would be welcome.

You just have to define "per-system" somehow; what is the system
identifier.

If it's the hostname, then in your shell init scripts you can set
HOSTNAME=`hostname` and then you can have a gconf source with the
hostname in the path. Put this in ~/.gconf.path:

xml:readwrite:$(HOME)/.gconf-$(ENV_HOSTNAME)

Of course, then *all* your settings will be host-specific. To avoid
that, you could manually copy only some settings to the host-specific
location, and then make it xml:readonly: to gconf.

If you want an identifier other than hostname, just use it instead...

I've never added any kind of standard per-user-per-system config path
because I don't see how it can happen automatically without creating
unreasonable levels of user-visible complexity. But if someone figured
it out, we could do it.

Havoc