Re: Make default

[Michael Vogt <mvo ubuntu com>]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 11:05:45PM +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 18:50 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > I was pointing out that several distros are shipping with various
> > 'make default' patches.  'Use sabayon' is not the right answer to that
> > situation. 
> 
> Could you explain a little more about why Sabayon is not the right
> answer? My understanding was that one of Sabayon's goals was to set
> system defaults.
> 
> Also, could you explain a bit more about the rationale for setting
> system defaults, especially for those people who primarily use
> single-user setups. I'm not sure we can draw up a good plan for how to
> integrate this functionality if we don't understand who and what it is
> used by.

I agree that most functionatlity is well served with the current
gnome-control-center design that applies to sessions only.

But only most :) Our use case in Ubuntu is that we want to provide a
way to make the keyboard and proxy settings availalbe system-wide.

This has the nice effect that new users get them automatically. I know
that a lot of people share the machine with
e.g. girlfriend/boyfried/kids etc. Having a "Apply system-wide" is
very useful for them. 

Also for people who want (or have to) boot into a environment without
gnome (xfce, kde, recovery terminal, text only for whatever reason)
they will find that there proxy and keyboard settings are not there.

I can see the following options to fulfill the use cases I described
above: 
1. ship a seperate programm to do the global keyboard settings that has
   a different menu and (probably) a different UI
2. integrate with gnome-control-center to have one place to set the
   keyboard with [Apply] and [Apply system-wide]
3. integrate with gnome-control-center and make [Apply] apply globally
   as well automatically
4. do nothing