Re: Multiple sessions for the same user?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

Brian Nitz wrote:
> One problem I hear about from time to time is when someone is using the 
> same home directory for several sessions on different machines which may 
> be running different versions of GNOME.
>
> e.g. Logged into my NFS home directory on a laptop running Gnome 2.10 in 
> ubuntu.
> Simultaneously logged into the same home directory on Sun Ray running 
> GNOME 2.20 on Solaris Nevada.  (and/or Gnome 2.6 on Solaris 10!)
>
> I know we can't fix past problems (easily), but if we consider the 
> possibility of this sort of use, we might make things better down the road.

Indeed. There are some past discussions of this. The challenge is that 
for all the on-disk stuff people have to maintain not only backward but 
also "forward" compatibility; you can't do things like add a possible 
value of a gconf key that will break older versions of the program.

Unfortunately it's very hard to be sure nobody introduces any bugs of 
this type, in any application, between any of the possible combinations 
of GNOME versions... it's good to remind people of the issue and try to 
minimize the bugs, but without a pretty extensive effort to QA the 
behavior of GNOME releases in this context, I'm doubtful it will 
reliably work to mix arbitrary GNOME versions with a shared homedir, 
sadly. It's very easy to break this accidentally and in each release 
there are many changes people make that are likely to break it.

Havoc