[gnome-love] Love for gconf-editor?

[Frederic Peters <fpeters entrouvert com>]

Hello,

Here in Brussels the local LUG has been assisting a small company (~50
computers) in its migration to GNU/Linux.  It started three years ago
with servers and desktops were next in July 2002.  It was Gnome 1.4(?)
and it was sometimes difficult for the IT manager (member of the LUG)
to justify choices but by early 2003 it was considered a successful
migration by the management and things went on.  

Now that users are happy with their Gnome 2 desktops we decided to
think a bit about the sysadmin job and help him handle configuration
for all the workstations in a single place.  There is currently lots
of scripts with gconftool calls and this works fine but there's not
much love in them.  The idea is to focus on gconf-editor.

There are several ideas :

 - general improvements to gconf-editor (benefit both admin and users)
   such as search (bug #82902) and HIG work

 - possibility to edit /etc/gconf/2/path (well, I don't know if it's
   standardized across distributions, on my Debian system better files
   to edit would be /etc/gconf/2/local-{defaults,mandator}.path)

 - possibility to choose a config source and use gconf-editor
   interface to browser and set values (similar requests in #97335 and
   #100591)

 - [gconf] more backends (ldap, anything through libgda) (not that
   important for us since the workstations can be updated with new
   files easily) (wasn't there a ldap backend once ?)


What are your thoughts on this ?  Is gconf-editor a base to work on or
should we go with a new project (since we would build on gnome libs
and not just gtk) ?  


Thanks for reading,

        Frederic