Re: copying settings from one user to another

[John Gotts <jgotts ww2 tqstats com>]

[Beginning to drift off-topic.]

In message <20001003102806 A86251 gelatinous com>, Bret Mogilefsky writes:

>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 a
>ny
>> 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 ca
>se, 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 abs
>olute path on my own machine because the NFS automount happens through the loo
>pback device... Rather than using my home directory as it exists in /etc/passw
>d 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.  

No it doesn't require special attention!  In our case, home directories are
accessible on client machines as:

/.automount/<NFS server name>/root/home/<user id>

Since the NFS server is also a client, home directories are accessible the same
way there.

If, say, some user's home directory is located in /home2 on the NFS server, it
would still be accessible from the same location on every client (and on the
server).

I don't know what automounter you are running, but Red Hat's automounter has
worked like this since at least 5.0 (and probably since the beginning of Red
Hat).  If your distribution doesn't work like this, its automounter is
misconfigured.

>FOR THE NOVICE USER ESPECIALLY who has no idea how his home directory works, t
>his isn't even fixable. Example: I'll be setting up Linux stations running GNO
>ME 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 spa
>ce available.  They don't know ANYTHING about the network topology or where th
>eir home directory really is, and they shouldn't have to.

>What happens when the path to your home directory *has* to change?  When NFS i
>sn't possible?  When you want to share some configuration between machines eit
>her 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 g
>et 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 t
>he 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 .gnom
>e files used the $HOME variable then it would be no problem... I'd just sftp o
>r rsync the files from my home on my own machine to the home on the shared mac
>hine.  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 furth
>er out of sync.  I should be able to obliterate the pref files at home with th
>e ones at work before I leave the office every day, and have them work flawles
>sly when I get home.

>I'm sorry to go on about this, but I think it's a very important issue.  If yo
>u 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 fa
>r. =)

I agree that GNOME's per-user configuration data storage scheme is horrible,
but Havoc (and others) are working on GConf to improve things.  Perhaps the
best thing would have been to have had every file under .gnome be plain text,
editable, and by definition all file-related data contained therein be relative
to the user's home directory unless a full path was specified.

Your complaints about the difficulty of setting up machines located in
different locations used for different purposes to have identical interfaces
is really a very general problem in computing.  Even if your office machines
and your home machines run identical operation system versions, do you really
want to insure that you have identical packages installed in both locations?
Otherwise, your configurations would have to fork.  And this has nothing to do
with GNOME.  I would argue that it's actually *better* to have a configuration
for work and a configuration for home.  In my case, I have a configuration for
when I log into our web servers, I have a configuration for the office, I have
a configuration for the university machines, I have a configuration for my home
machines, and I one especially intended for disconnected operation on my
laptops.  Would I want a straighforward dump from one to the other?  No way.
But the point is is that I've made sharing easy when it makes sense.

John

--
John GOTTS <jgotts linuxsavvy com>  http://www.linuxsavvy.com/staff/jgotts