Re: Make default

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 21:37 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:

> The curious thing about sabayon is that when you pitch it to somebody,
> most people are very enthusiastic about it. But I have yet to meet
> somebody who actually uses sabayon regularly....

Ask in sabayon-list; there is a good number of regular users, especially
now that Scott Balneaves has worked hard to make Sabayon usable.

> I think of sabayon as an account setup / role definition tool, which
> is not quite the same as system settings.
> System settings I think splits into
> 
> - system-wide defaults for session settings
> 
> - settings that may have an effect outside of user sessions

This is correct.  The distinction is not always obvious - Sabayon is
intended to deal with your first case.

In terms for your first case, Sabayon has a couple of quasi-problems:

1. Sabayon by default only handles configuration through GConf.  It
needs custom code to deal with non-GConf things like Firefox,
OpenOffice.org, etc.

2. It really only deals with user's configuration.  Sabayon won't pick
up changes that a "Make default" thing makes outside the user's home.

If I'm not mistaken, gnome-power-manager's "Make default" button changes
some GConf defaults.  This is somewhat different to what Sabayon would
normally do, which is to let you use the same GConf settings as possibly
mandatory defaults for a class of users.

Of course there's a difference between "I want to make the computer work
right for my family" and "I want to make defaults for hundreds of users"
--- in the former case you don't want to have to use Sabayon; in the
latter case you *do* want a tool that will let you centralize changes to
configuration.  If you rely only on "Make default" for the case of
hundreds of users, you still have to know which files got touched so you
can deploy them.  I don't know if sysadmins normally just make a working
system and then simply image it to hundreds of computers, or use
something more abstract like Sabayon...

At some point there was an idea of giving apps the ability to
communicate with Sabayon if they were running inside it.  A
configuration option could turn from

   [ ] Frob the fritz

to this:

   [ ] Frob the fritz  [Default|v]

That's a drop-down with the usual "default / mandatory" options.  This
makes apps harder to write as you need to add those buttons, but it
would probably make sysadminning much easier.  Again, those options
would only appear if the app is running under Sabayon.  Or the app could
present a somewhat different configuration dialog if it's running under
Sabayon; one that is really designed to set up a user profile for that
app.  Complexity caveat.

  Federico