panel configuration incompatibilities [Re: Moving dot files to ~/.etc]

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc redhat com>]

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 15:58, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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.

	I didn't agree at first - I didn't think it was worth moving the panel
configuration upstream to support sharing your homedir with GNOME 2.2
and before. We don't fix bugs in GNOME 2.2, right?

	But, you make a good point - if distributions do this in their packages
(e.g. I had planned to use /apps/panel/profiles_rhel4) - then the
situation actually becomes even worse. You wouldn't be able to share
your configuration between various distributions or with upstream. And
that situation would persist indefinitely. What a mess.

	So, I'm committing a patch to change the location of the panel
configuration in GNOME 2.10 and I'm using the opportunity to actually do
something worthwhile too - killing off the broken concept of panel
"profiles" which we never really used.

	The new panel layout look the same as before, but everything is now in
/apps/panel - i.e.

  /apps/panel/general/toplevel_id_list
  /apps/panel/general/applet_id_list
  /apps/panel/general/object_id_list/
  /apps/panel/toplevels/...
  /apps/panel/applets/...
  /apps/panel/objects/...


	The upshot of this is:

  1) When you login to GNOME 2.9/2.10, the panel copies your 
     configuration to /apps/panel

  2) If you log back into GNOME 2.8 or earlier, your old configuration
     is still there but you won't see changes which you made in 2.9

  3) /apps/panel/general/profiles_migrated controls whether the 
     copy-old-configuration stuff happens on login - so, and admin can
     set it in the default config so that everyone gets a clean slate 
     with 2.10, or you can unset it to force a new copy-old-config

Cheers,
Mark.