gconf path problem, Sun GNOME

[ryan stat Berkeley EDU]

In a mixed Linux and Solaris environment with NFS mounted home directories, we
would like to be able to separate the GConf preference handling by OS. While we
can separate the readwrite paths on each platform, there are problems when
gconf processes try to communicate with each other over the network. (when a
user logs into each OS at the same time) A client app will find a gconfd
running on the other architecture which violates the path separation.

(The major problem is fonts. Sun and Debian obviously don't share fonts and if
a user modifies their font preferences on Debian, for example, the UI can get
completely out of whack when they login to a Sun. There are other problems like
when apps store paths to programs in gconf prefs and the path to the program
may not be the same across OSs.)

Both our Sun and Debian GNOME distributions do not have the GCONF_LOCAL_LOCKS
patch. Is it possible to keep gconf prefs separate across architectures and
still permit users to login on two machines at the same time?

Ryan