Re: Moving dot files to ~/.etc

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 11:37 +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 	One example of the kind of problems you might see is that the panel
> configuration before 2.4 conflicts with the panel configuration in 2.4
> and later. In retrospect we should have stored the new panel
> configuration in a different location.

And we should still fix this.

It was a longstanding policy that the 2.2 -> 2.4 transition broke, see
"backwards/forward compatibility" on this page:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/

What we should do is apply the fix to 2.8.x and 2.10, and recommend that
distributions backport it to any 2.4 or 2.6 based packages.

The alternative is for distributions to permanently fork the panel
configuration location from upstream GNOME in order to fix this bug.
That doesn't make any sense for either upstream GNOME or for
distributions.

We have to be willing to fix this kind of bug, despite some pain,
because if even one app is broken in this respect it really screws the
entire desktop for sharing a homedir between multiple workstations.

There is no reason this fix should be done only on the distribution
level, we don't need each distribution storing config keys in its own
unique place.

Havoc