Re: Debian gconf policy

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Fri, 2003-03-14 at 21:13, Johannes Rohr wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've been working on the nautilus-media package that Emil has prepared.
> (My revised package is available at
> deb http://home.arcor.de/debian/unstable/ ./ )
> It includes gst-thumbnail that generates thumbnails of video files for
> nautilus' icon view.
> 
> Since totem offers the same funtionality, Michael Dänzer suggested
> earlier, that on deinstallation nautilus-media should restore the
> respective gconf keys to make totem the default thumbnailer application
> for videos again.
> 
> The only workaround I found for this was, to let debconf ask the user at
> configuration time whether or not to use gst-thumbnail. If not, the
> registration of the schemas file for gst-thumbnail is skipped.
> 
> But I think that this is a dirty hack. The nautilus-media package is
> unaware of whether or not totem is installed. So it asks this question
> even if no other thumbnailing application for video files is installed.
> 
> I wonder if there is a better and more general way to address this kind
> of issues. There may be other cases where several packages want to
> manipulate the same gconf key. In such a case, shouldn't there be a way
> of backing up old gconf settings in order to restore them later, when a
> package is uninstalled? Or maybe several applications could use shared
> debconf templates, to keep them aware of the presence of a "competitor"
> package. I think that the different available display managers (wdm,
> kdm, gdm, xdm) are managed in such a manner.
> 
> Is there already a kind of Debian gconf policy available anywhere that
> addresses these issues?

In the Totem sources, there's a data/update-gconf.sh which updates the
values for the current user. Maybe I should add a button in the Totem
preferences to reset the values to Totem, a bit like Windows
applications update their associations.

CC:'ed desktop-devel to get some opinions on that.

Cheers

-- 
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>