Re: copying settings from one user to another

[Bret Mogilefsky <mogul gelatinous com>]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2000 at 12:35:26AM -0400, John Gotts wrote:
> GNOME works fine with NFS home directories.  In this office we use
> /net/<NFS server name>/home/<login id> for home directories.  Just make sure
> that the NFS server is also running amd or else you will have problems
> (/home/<login id> versus /net/<NFS server name>/home/<login id> and making a
> symlink doesn't seem to correct the problem).  In any case, I can log into any
> of a dozen machines and get an identical GNOME session.

We do the same; that's not the kind of situation Iwas referring to.  In any case, that STILL requires special attention.  Say my background image is in ~/bg.png.  If I set the background through the control center, I still get the absolute path on my own machine because the NFS automount happens through the loopback device... Rather than using my home directory as it exists in /etc/passwd for "/sony/rodan/mogul/bg.png", I get "/usr1/home/mogul/bg.png".  The moment I go to another machine, my background is not found.  I have to explicitly go back in afterwards and set the filename to /sony/rodan/mogul.  How can GNOME cope with all the potential ways my home dir might be mapped/linked/mounted?  It can't unless it simply respects ~ or $HOME wherever it can.  Then the file would have been recorded as ~/bg.png or $HOME/bg.png and I would never have to run into this.  

FOR THE NOVICE USER ESPECIALLY who has no idea how his home directory works, this isn't even fixable. Example: I'll be setting up Linux stations running GNOME with NIS and auto-mounted home directories at the high school where my wife teaches.  A kid should be able to log in to any machine and have personal space available.  They don't know ANYTHING about the network topology or where their home directory really is, and they shouldn't have to.

What happens when the path to your home directory *has* to change?  When NFS isn't possible?  When you want to share some configuration between machines either by rsync or by just tarring up in one place and untarring in another?  My .login, .cshrc, .bashrc, .emacs, .aliases, etc are all be written in terms of $HOME.  If I get a new account at, say, SourceForge, all of my dotfiles just get untarred in place and I'm good to go.  However, ~/.gnome does not have this portability.  YES, no problem if the paths are the same from one machine to the next, but what if you don't have a choice?  What if I'm given an account on a machine for which I don't have root?  Now I have to maintain my preferences in two places, my own machine and the account on that machine... If the .gnome files used the $HOME variable then it would be no problem... I'd just sftp or rsync the files from my home on my own machine to the home on the shared machine.  I face this every day when I go home... I spend most of my time at work and as a result my desktop is totally customized; when I go home it's a pain in the ass to reproduce the same customizations and they get further and further out of sync.  I should be able to obliterate the pref files at home with the ones at work before I leave the office every day, and have them work flawlessly when I get home.

I'm sorry to go on about this, but I think it's a very important issue.  If you expect people to get by without having to drop to a command prompt every few seconds, this is a glaring omission in usability.  Thanks for reading this far. =)


Bret
--
Bret Mogilefsky  ** mogul playstation sony com **  Programmer, SCEA R&D