hardcoded values in ~/.gconf

[John Russell <drjimmy42 yahoo com>]

I have had this nagging question  for some time and finally decided to
just ask and take the flaming that may ensue.  

Some time ago I tried to have my home directory be portable so that I
could just tar the thing up and drop it in place wherever I was.  I use
gnome almost exlusively.  Anyway, I have different usernames at home and
at work and the explosion that ensued when I started up gnome after
dropping in my home directory was something to behold.  I discovered
that the reason for this was that the ~/.gconf directory was filled with
references both to my username (from home of course) and the absolute
path to my home directory.  

Herein lies my confusion.  Why is this information necessary?  Why
doesn't gconf care at all to whom any particular key belongs?  Why isn't
it possible to use environment variables (such as $HOME) to allow for
relative paths?  The path problem is occurs when I try to run gnome on
my solaris machine where home is in /export/home instead of just /home. 
Oh the horror.  

Thanks for any responses.  Keep up the great work.

Sincerely,
John