Re: nice /. comment

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 06:05:08PM -0800, George Farris wrote: 
> OK this statement just plain scares me.  GNOME 2.6 is over a year away
> and quite frankly we just can't wait that long for central
> administration.  
> 
> Sorry for the bluntness but hey as an enterprise user and
> administrator,  we need this now. 2.4 is OK but 2.6 thats too long. 
> We've been waiting for this since the first article praising the fact
> that GCONF would provide this.  Thats a long time ago.

I would like to get some nice stuff in 2.4, but there also are
workable solutions today that are granted more hacky and less
convenient. But for example you can today have a gconf source which is
on a shared read-only NFS or AFS directory, that provides either
mandatory or default settings to everyone mounting that directory.
This gives you somewhere to drop settings that won't break as you
install/uninstall packages and that will affect all users on their
next login. And you can of course run scripts to install default
settings as part of kickstart or other mass/nightly installation
mechanisms.

Also, some lock down does work now in the form of mandatory settings
(meaning a read-only source in gconf path file sets the setting before
user sources do); I believe the control center has at least most of
the settings working with it, as does perhaps the least-useful app to
lock down (gnome-terminal). Metacity should also support it.

"enterprise" central admin probably means "something more
scalable/convenient than an NFS share," such as LDAP or a dedicated
server of some flavor. Also as described in the OLS 2002 proceedings
paper, would like to handle laptop/disconnected operation. Then we
want to do more testing of apps handling mandatory settings properly,
and add some explicit lockdown toggles like "no changing the menus."

The basic mechanism (adding another source to the /etc/gconf/2/path
file) will be the same though, at least that's my guess.

To some extent, this stuff isn't fully interesting until Evolution and
other key apps are taking advantage of it.

I would appreciate suggestions on what you'd like to see in order to
prioritize the key points.

Havoc