Re: GNOME Development Series Addition

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="Havoc Pennington">

> On Sat, Apr 12, 2003 at 03:02:48PM -0400, Erik Pukinskis wrote:
> > Thus 99% of users have no use for system-wide preferences, and the ones
> > that do are admins.  For this reason, it seems to me that all of these
> > applets should set preferences for just the current user.  The
> > system-wide preferences can be accessed from a separate app that allows
> > admins to control the usage parameters of the machine in general.  This
> > app could also include things like security lock-down settings.
> 
> I'm almost convinced, that seems like a very sane argument. One thing that
> I'm not convinced on is hardware configuration. Do I really want to
> configure my video card driver once per user?

Yeah, this sounds sensible.

The video driver thing could be solved simply through hardware detection on
install and boot (the system drops you into an admin tool when required).
'Normal users' would handle ad-hoc administration only when things change.

When you have something really dynamic, it becomes a problem. Network
settings are a good example of this. Windows now has the concept of:

  - a system network device configuration (anyone can use it, but only the
    admin can change it),
  - a private user's network device configuration (only that user can see
    and use it),
  - a public user's network device configuration (anyone can see and use it)

It almost reflects the levels of GConf configuration.

- Jeff

-- 
linux.conf.au 2004: Adelaide, Australia         http://lca2004.linux.org.au/
 
      "In addition to these ample facilities, there exists a powerful
       configuration tool called gcc." - Elliot Hughes, author of lwm