Re: Multiple sessions for the same user?

[Brian Nitz <Brian Nitz Sun COM>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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.
>   
I understand.  Until then I can only recommend the hack to put different 
versions of GNOME config files in different subdirectories and use a 
script or manually port config file values between releases. 
> 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.
>   
Yes, it is hard work to QA every combination of (N keys + R releases)!  
This is why when I receive complaints of such behaviour in unstable 
releases, I can only recommend to log the bug against failure of key 
portability in a specific combination of stable releases.  I don't want 
to add anything heavyweight to gconf, but I wonder if associating 
stability values with gconf keys and key subdirs would help manage 
future portability and allow as much configuration inheritance as 
possible without breaking everything?


> Havoc
>
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