Re: gconfd and multiple machines

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 06:43:17PM -0400, Owen Taylor wrote: 
> Unfortunately, I think the real way forward to fix the problem in
> an environment like the one you are in is write a central config 
> server that has good Kerberos integration and to which administrators
> feel comfortable exporting as widely as their AFS servers.

This should not be as hard as one might think, because a) dbus can do
the networking and kerberos aspect for us b) the implementation of
actually putting stuff on disk, etc. can be the same as for the
per-user daemon c) with dbus the conversion to/from wire protocol is
also the same for the per-user and the network-wide daemon.  I have a
good idea from doing dbus how to write one daemon that can work for
both systemwide and per-user.

Still, it's a fair bit of work.

> Though there are things that might be better than nothing -- for
> instance, assuming working home directory file system locking,
> it shouldn't be that hard to implement something where the
> user is presented with the choice of:
> 
>  - Stealing the config database from the last session; all
>    further changes on the previous session will be lost.
> 
>  - Having all changes in this session be lost after logout.
> 

One thing we could do pretty trivially is have a backend that just
keeps a gconf database in memory (never syncs the data to disk), and
if you're logged in twice, this backend gets inserted in front of your
gconf path.

To disable changes for a session (either previous or existing) you
just insert this backend for the one you want to disable.

The hack of keeping a single file for each toplevel directory
(/apps/foo, /apps/bar) might be more user friendly, but it
unfortunately would change the file format so would produce loss of
settings on upgrade.

Havoc