Re: Configurable desktop items for sysadmins

["A. Walton" <awalton gnome org>]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 5:22 PM, Federico Mena
Quintero<federico ximian com> wrote:
> [Re-sending from the correct address; sorry if you get a duplicate]
>
> Hi, all,
>
> A while ago, during the development of openSUSE 11.1, I wrote an
> extensive patch for Nautilus to let a system administrator set up
> desktop icons which would show up in users' desktops.
>
> I can't find anything on the mailing list archives related to this, nor
> in my Sent folder, so I guess I only talked to this to Alex on IRC.
>
> The idea is this:
>
> You are a system administrator, and you would like to populate your
> users' desktops with some icons:  a link to the helpdesk, or some
> commonly-used template documents used in your site, or something like
> that.
>
> My implementation works like this:
>
> 1. The sysadmin sets the /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined_items_dir key
> in GConf to point to a directory.  Nautilus will see what files are in
> that directory, and it will show them as icons in users' desktops.
>
> 2. Users see the desktop items and can manipulate them as usual, except
> that some of them may not be removable.
>
> 3. If the sysadmin drops a .desktop file in the predefined_items_dir,
> then that file may have an "X-XDG-Is-Mandatory" boolean key.  If it is
> true, then the user cannot remove that item.  If it is false, the idea
> was that the user could hide that item away from his normal view, and
> show it again if he turns on "Show hidden files".
>
> My implementation's policy was biased towards the sysadmin - items are
> mandatory by default, and you have to make them non-mandatory
> explicitly.  Alex wasn't happy about this, if I remember correctly.
> Fortunately, that's easy to change.
>
> Anyway --- my old code for this is here:
> http://gitorious.org/nautilus/nautilus - look for the branch called
> "sysadmin-desktop-items-opensuse".
>
> I am not happy at all about the code in there, though.  My idea was to
> turn NautilusDesktopDirectory into something like
> NautilusMergedDirectory, which would combine the contents of ~/Desktop
> and the directory which the sysadmin had configured.  This proved to be
> rather hard, and the branch in that repository reflects that; there are
> a lot of fixes and general cruft that I haven't cleaned up yet.
>
> I just wonder if this is something that people generally want.  If so, I
> can rebase the code to a recent version of Nautilus and try to clean it
> up.  I'm also wondering if there is an easier way to "merge" the
> sysadmin directory into the desktop directory.
>

I can see where the idea comes from, and it's sane from a syadmin's view,
but from the user's point of view, it's quite evil, especially when it creates
things that cannot be removed (easily or otherwise). It's also very complicated
to maintain, as noted in your mail. To date, it's generally policy to turn down
changes like this. For reference: the global templates directory debate.

Perhaps there's a non-Nautilus solution to the problem, a one-shot program
that creates the links at startup if they don't exist, and watches to see
if the user deletes them (or has some preference somewhere to have
the program delete them and not respawn them later).

The proposed solution only services the people who actually need this
capability and doesn't drive users crazy by creating unavoidable clutter
(and prevents distributions/OEMs from shipping tons of likewise
'undestroyable' desktop links and spares us getting bugs about not being
able to delete files from the Desktop).

-A. Walton

>  Federico
>
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