Re: [sabayon] Customising Pidgin

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Fri, 2007-08-17 at 21:09 +0100, Graham Cole wrote:
> One thing which I'd like to do is have the Pidgin (formerly Gaim)  
> instant messenger automatically configured to connect to our  
> organisation's XMPP server for newly created users. The major issue  
> here is the fact that Pidgin needs to have the username stored in its  
> accounts file in order to create any kind of usable configuration.
> 
> What I'm wondering is if there's a sensible way to do this in the  
> context of Sabayon. I don't see any obvious mechanism for  
> substituting variables into configuration files. It seems to me that  
> it's a reasonable thing to want to do (consider also configuring e.g.  
> e-mail accounts).

This is definitely something which would need a new data provider in
Sabayon.

For example, look at sabayon/lib/sources/mozillasource.py.  To deal with
Mozilla's configuration, we use a delegate on top of the files source
(which just listens for changes to files).  The Mozilla delegate
understands about Mozilla's configuration files; it parses them and can
write them back as appropriate.  

For Pidgin would need something similar.

Over at Novell I was writing a specification for the lockdown schemes
that various applications should have.  Attached is what I had so far
for Gaim - it's probably incomplete, but it should be a good starting
point :)

  Federico

Title: Summary of requirements for Gaim

Define default IM accounts. Similar to Evolution, each account has many parameters, but only a few of them change for each different user (perhaps only username/password). There should be a template system which the system administration can re-use for different users, and just change a few parameters in each. The default IM accounts should be associated to a corresponding user profile. Lock down the IM accounts, to prevent them from being changed or deleted. Optionally, disallow creating new IM accounts.

Again, similar to the case of Evolution, users may periodically be asked to change their passwords. These passwords may also apply to the corporate IM accounts. If the default accounts are locked down, and accept no changes from the user, there needs to be a way for the user to change his password in those accounts when requested.