Re: gconfd and multiple machines

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 07:54:11PM -0400, seth vidal wrote:
> > We shouldn't dump out the baby with the bathwater.
> 
> My problem is that the bathwater is two years old.
> 
> It needs changing and it needs changing sooner than later.
> 
> The people who ARE using gnome and linux on the desktop in an enterprise
> have had to piecemeal this together  and just tell their users - don't
> login to more than one place - which just sucks.

Yeah, we know. Just can't get anyone else to work on it, and are only
slowly able to do it ourselves.

I don't want to cause half-ass churn - i.e. I don't want to lose your
settings in GNOME 2.4, then lose them a different way in 2.6, then
break the API in 2.8, and so forth; I'd like to just do the block of
work (it's probably a 2-months-ish block) and ship it in one go, so
there's only one migration if one is required, and only one round of
instability.

I was hoping the local locks stuff would be a decent hack for now but
I guess it doesn't work by itself.

Blah. I would have the time to work on it right now if the menu system
weren't an issue.
 
> 1. kill off all explicit paths being stored anywhere in the config data
> - meaning - evo should stop storing my home dir path in it's config
> files b/c I want my evo config to stay the same even if my homedir lives
> in a slightly different place.

This is a bug even today, if you file it on bugzilla.ximian.com don't
let them NOTABUG you. ;-) 

> 2. figure out a way for a user to grab this data and push it onto their
> laptop or what not for offline use.

Did you see my Ottawa Linux Symposium paper from 2002? It's in the
proceedings on their web site. I have a whole plan for offline, I just
need my two-month block. (Or help.)

> 3. you might as well grab all config files and put them in here. This
> could include epiphany/galeon/web browser of the week, evo vfolders,
> addressbooks, etc <- the major reason is that at this point you've got a
> lot of what acap was intended for but never resolved.

Yeah I want to make things scale up to be able to hold all config
data.
 
> Additionally, this is a place where talking to people outside of gnome
> would be really wise - the chandler folks are working on this sort of
> config/data storage routines and it might be wise to coordinate with
> them. 

Part of the D-BUS idea is to have something that requires less
GNOME-specific buy-in.

Havoc