Re: gconf path problem, Sun GNOME

[Brian Cameron <Brian Cameron Sun COM>]

Ryan/Others:

> 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?

It would probably be a better (but more time-consuming) solution if
GNOME could simply deal better with a cross-platform environment.
This would be more work, but would make the user's desktop more
consistant across platforms.

Perhaps this might require that gconf allow certain preferences to
have per-host settings.

Other problems are caused by gconf settings containing full pathnames
which are not consistant across platforms.  It would be better if
the full pathnames were not stored in gconf, but were instead computed
at runtime.  In other words, it might make more sense if gconfd simply
knew where to look for pixmaps on a given system, etc.

Brian