Re: [sabayon] Prevent users to delete mandatory gconf xml

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Wed, 2007-08-22 at 11:06 +0200, Vincent wrote:

> I'm using sabayon on my desktop but i have little question about
> mandatory gconf xml file stocked in home directory of users.
> The problem is that the users can delete mandatory file and gnome
> desktop locks are useless... So i code a simple patch that create and
> locks this file to prevent users from delete it.
> 
> It's just a script executed after gdm login. The good point is that
> the script work, the bad is how it work. I use POSIX Acl to add a mask
> that to a root file in a user's home directory... 
> Yes I know, it's very bad because you need a F.S. with ACL enabled....

Hi, Vincent --- thanks for working on this, and sorry for the late
reply.  Don't you love it when you find an important mail in your Inbox
which you didn't reply to in a long time?

This is indeed a big problem in the way Sabayon stores the mandatory
settings in GConf.  The root of the problem is that "sabayon-apply"
wants to take everything from the user profile and put it in the user's
home directory.  There are parts that should not be done in the user's
home, as you have discovered :)

I talked to other Novell people about this and it seems that the general
solution is to store the gconf.xml.mandatory *outside* the user's home
directory.  You could think of having

  /etc/gconf/user-profiles/
	/students
		/defaults
		/mandatory
	/professors
		/defaults
		/mandatory
	/tenured-bastards
		/defaults
		/mandatory

And then playing some tricks with the order in which paths are included
in the GConf configuration.  I haven't thought about this fully yet, but
it seems feasible.

  Federico