Re: key "ownership"

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Frederic Gobry <frederic gobry smartdata ch> writes: 
> A last question (they all say that :-)): let's imagine a configuration
> with two users, one privileged, the other not. The unprivileged user
> can read part of the configuration of the privileged one, but cannot
> modify it. As these are two users, they each run their own gconfd. How
> do these two gconfd interact ? Would modifications made on the shared
> part be detected by the read-only gconfd ? Or is it completely left to
> the backends ?
> 

What would happen now with the default XML backend is that one of the
gconfd would fail to lock the shared source. The right thing is that
notification of changes should originate from the backend, and this
would all be handled. But of course for the XML backend that requires
either polling the filesystem or something like FAM, and is still
tricky because you have multiple keys in each XML file. So the issue
is not addressed in the current implementation.

(The current implementation has many weaknesses, and I have the
beginnings of a plan for gradually reworking it over the GNOME 2.x
series, but it's good enough for your basic use-cases right now.)

Havoc