Re: system wide settings

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Thu, 2010-12-02 at 17:45 +0100, Rodrigo Moya wrote:

> While packaging the new g-c-c for Ubuntu, I came across a couple of
> patches
> (http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/gnome-control-center/ubuntugtk3/annotate/head%3A/debian/patches/50_ubuntu_systemwide_prefs.patch and http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/gnome-control-center/ubuntugtk3/annotate/head%3A/debian/patches/51_ubuntu_system_keyboard.patch ), and, as I was going to rebase them, I wonder if there's any plan for system-wide applying of settings from cc-panels.
> 
> I guess other distributions do something similar for other panels, so,
> what do Fedora, openSuSE, etc do? Should we provide a generic framework
> for allowing distros to add this functionality easily instead of having
> to patch the code?

As far as I can tell, both patches make different capplets call out to
D-bus services to set some parameters for the whole system; in this
case, the network proxies and the keyboard layout.

Do you remember the old idea about an AdminKit which would implement
exactly this kind of stuff?  Then the capplets would just call the
services in AdminKit to configure those things.

I guess most distros either add such an ad-hoc "Make default" or "Apply
system-wide" option, or they rely on their specific systemwide
configuration tools.  In either case, an AdminKit would be perfectly
applicable, with both parts (userspace and system tools) being able to
call the AdminKit services for configuration.

For network proxies in particular, in openSUSE we have a rather exotic
way to propagate the system's configuration for network proxies into the
GConf space for Gnome apps:  

http://old-en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Proxy_configuration

The idea is that the stuff in /etc/sysconfig/proxy needs to be made
available to Gnome apps, which expect the proxy configuration to be in
GConf.  The patch does that in a way that ensures that a user's
configuration is not lost.

  Federico