[sabayon] use case (sort of argument for profile inheritance)

[Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com>]

Hey, all-

So... forget for a second that I am working on the liveCD, or that I
said anything about this topic in IRC today :) In this email, I'm
going to propose what I think is a fairly typical use case (if a
lamely written one), and then discuss it a bit. It turns out it does
apply to me, but ignore that for the moment :)

Let us assume I work at a reasonably large organization (FooCorp) with
a large number of types of users. Presumably all of these users are in
some way standard FooCorp users- I, the admin, want them all to have
branded FooCorp screensavers, and a handful of other FooCorp mandated
settings. Otherwise, they are mostly different- some various classes
of developers, some executives, a couple types of  FooCorp gets hit by
a thief who walked in, found a machine whose screensaver wasn't
locked, and gets critical data, so it comes down from On High that all
machines have to lock their screens after 3 minutes of inactivity. So,
I need to change the policy on all users machines to lock down the
users. How do I do that in my management tool?

After talking some with Mark and Daniel today, the answer in sabayon
currently is 'open every single profile, add the setting via the
xscreensaver config dialog, save, close, redistribute.' In any company
with a large number of different user groups, this is going to suck.

Now, this applies to me and the liveCD because I'd thought that there
was some parent-child relationship between profiles, and I'd planned
to have one profile with non-translated stuff (mainly gconf keys, for
example) and then data (the 'why gnome' pdf) in a child profile that
was language-specific, so that if I decided to change the default
browser or whatever, I could change it once and every language would
pick it up. We plan to have a CD for every supported language, so
scaling matters. DV argues very convincingly that the inheritance I
thought could happen can't within the design constraints of the
sabayon file format, so... I guess I'm sort of hosed.  But in case you
guys ever do a redesign and rethink the other requirements, here is
the use case (both abstract and my concrete case) for you to ponder.

HTH-
Luis