Re: Module proposal: dconf

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 17:51 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
> 2009/10/14 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
> > On Wed, 2009-10-14 at 15:54 +0100, Alan Cox wrote:
> >> Take 20,000 distro Gnome users, what percentage of them do you think have
> >> ever hand edited their configuration, what percentage do you think have
> >> ever used things like gconftool. For that matter what percentage of
> >> normal users do you think even understand the question "Have you ever
> >> hand edited your gconf database"
> >
> > No doubt.  But ask that same question of sysadmins, and
> > you'll probably get a different answer.
> >
> > A better user experience trumps sysadmin concerns in my
> > book, but I would like to see some discussion of what
> > sorts of tools we'll be providing for administration.
> > I'd hate for us to lose out on a large deployment for
> > not being sysadmin-friendly.
> 
> Large deployments shouldn't mess with the local users' configuration.
> Probably specialized backends for GSettings like an APOC or plain LDAP
> one would be a much better approach to manage large deployments.
> 
> People messing with the users' configuration or the global system
> configuration in large systems is rather a symptom of the lack of
> proper tooling in that regard.

Um, yeah.  So unless those awesome tools exist, that's
not a very useful thing to tell them.

Pushing mandatory or default GConf settings to user
machines is fairly straightforward.  Maybe it's not
what we would consider an ideal solution, but it does
work.  Sysadmins make the best of what they have.

--
Shaun (who has sysadmin friends who do this stuff
and complain to him whenever Gnome makes their jobs
difficult, and who is just trying to pass on that
information)