Re: gnome-about-me

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 19:21 +0200, Diego Gonzalez wrote:
> 
> i'm planning on doing a gnome program to present information about the
> user and changed whatever is allowed.
> 
> I think that the information stored in GECOS should not be modified,
> things like full name, login name, room and phone are probably managed
> by an administrator. The question is, if i should allow this stuff to be
> changed by the "home user" and how to differentiate between "home
> installations" and an "managed installations" done by an admin.

I'd say we need some way to ask the system if the stuff is writable. I'd
write the code assuming there's a way to do that, and for now you could
make it a gconf setting and default to assuming writable, but admins
could set the gconf key to "not writable" - and if an OS vendor figures
out how to provide an automatically-figure-it-out hook they can easily
use that instead of the gconf key. Then be sure you have error handling
that does something sane if a write attempt fails.

> Here is a screenshot of the tool as it is rigth now:
> http://topos.ath.cx:8080/~diego/about-me-v2.png
> 
> any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thoughts on the dialog:
 
 - tabs might be better than disclosure triangles

 - I might put Password in a different dialog, because I think if a
   user wanted to change their password they'd look for
   Preferences->Password rather than Preferences->About Me
   (but then, number of menu items is a concern)

 - Fedora currently has an About Myself and Password 
   that you may want to look at (though I would not advocate
   them as exemplary or correct necessarily)

Havoc