Major problem with gconf mandatory settings.

[Marcin Antczak <marcin antczak idea net pl>]

Recently I was learning about gconf and found information about 
mandatory settings.

This is very important GConf feature - very usable for administrators 
etc. But this implies a major bug in almost all gnome applications with 
gconf support.


My english is poor so simple CLI example:

gconftool-2 --direct --config-source 
xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory/ --type string --set 
/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /home/marcin/ncube-1600.jpg

And now every user has wallpaper set to /home/marcin/ncube-1600.jpg - 
just because root wants to.

This is nice but then user can run application called 
gnome-background-properties and can try to change wallpaper.

But wallpaper will not change because user settings are overriden with 
mandatory settings - while user _will not have an idea about this_.
And propably will think that gnome-background-properties is just broken.


The problem is that this scenario can be applied in any application - 
for example in eog we can in mandatory settings turn off toolbar - and 
user can try to turn on toolbar in "view" menu to the end of time...

In my opinion this is a serious "structural" bug in gnome preferences 
system.

And I'am writing about this here because I don't know where exactly 
report this as a bug - gconf bug? Or maybe prepare a hundred of bug 
reports for each application that uses gconf?

I think that this has to be resolved - and I suppose that solution 
should be "centralized" - some kind of notification system, but I'm not 
C developer only system administrator and user.
And I'm asking for an advise - what do you think what to do with this?


Marcin Antczak