Re: [sabayon] Profile or profile changes not applied

[Scott Balneaves <sbalneav legalaid mb ca>]

On Tue, Feb 09, 2010 at 03:53:28PM +0100, Martin Jungowski wrote:
> I have a three seemingly separate issues with Sabayon (v2.29.5 but had
> these problems with 2.29.0, too) concerning how profiles and profile
> changes are applied (or rather not getting applied) to users.
> 
> Problem #1
> ----------
> Installed Sabayon 2.29.5, configured the system according to our needs
> and added the local users who are supposed to work with this machine
> using useradd (default procedure, nothing fancy). After creating a
> common profile and ticking the checkboxes next to the users that are
> supposed to use this profile the necessary .gconf.xml* and .gconf.path*
> files and folders are not created. When these users login for the first
> time Gnome applies its default profile, including panel, menu, etc.
> 
> In order to create the necessary .gconf.xml* and .gconf.path* files and
> folders I have to do the following:
> - link /usr/sbin/sabayon-apply to /usr/bin
> - login as user
> - run sabayon-apply
> 
> However, if the user has already logged in before the Sabayon profile is
> not getting applied, see Problem #3

By way of a permanent record:

We debugged #1 to a problem with the sabayon-xinitrc.sh.in file.  It started
with a bash shebang, which a .'d file shouldn't have.  That was one issue.
Another one was the fact that the sed in the Makefile.am wasn't replacing some
of the variables s!old!new!g, just s!old!new!.  So because there were 2 substs
on one line, one was replaced, the other wasn't.

http://git.gnome.org/browse/sabayon/commit/?id=e05fbc8b017808a24874a24c4afad023afaa8306

fixes those two problems.

One of the things that probably should be added, and which would allow at least
the debian & related distros to start using the sabayon supplied file would be
to add a XINITRC_ORDER_NUMBER variable.  So, this variable, if set, would
install the shell script at $XINITRC_ORDER_NUMBERsabayon-xinitrc.sh.  You could
then set this to 60, or 80 or what have you, and be able to control where the
sabayon session script is run in the startup process.  That's fairly simple,
I'll look at hacking that in, that way Debian & Ubuntu et al can just use the
sabayon-supplied script, one less thing for the packagers to maintain.

> Problem #2
> ----------
> Profile changes are not getting applied to the users who are assigned to
> the profile in question. This means that if for example I decide to add
> a panel object after the users have already logged in for the first time
> and loaded the Sabayon profile at least once this panel object is not
> getting added to the users' panels. This also goes for updated objects,
> for example fixing typos in autostart objects, editing the menu, etc.
> 
> Running sabayon-apply does not fix this. I have to manually run rm -rf
> .gconf.xml* rm -rf .gconf.path* first, then sabayon-apply for each user.
> I'm assuming that problem #1 and problem #2 share a common cause, but I
> haven't been able to figure it out yet.

We've modified sabayon-apply to *always* clean out .gconf.xml.*, we should also
clean out the .gconf.path.* files as well.

I'll add those in.

> When users change anything themselves the profile is rendered worthless.
> I've tried that with the Gnome panel and the Gnome menu. As soon as the
> user adds an object to the panel him or herself the Sabayon profile
> panel is not loaded anymore. This means that adding a new object to the
> profile panel on our part is not reflected in the user's panel, not even
> after going through the steps listed in #2. I found out that in addition
> to these steps I have to remove ~/.gconf/apps/panel/
> This does, however, delete all user-specific modifications.
> 
> This also means that if a user has logged in before we assigned a
> profile to him or her, and the default menu and panel has already been
> created, the Sabayon profile is not applied to that user at all.
> 
> 
> 
> We could easily do without solving problem #3, since that's only a minor
> annoyance. We don't want to lock our users down, so desktop and panel
> modifications (user-specific background, panel objects, desktop
> starters, etc.) are allowed for most of them. We found a solution to do
> it the hard way - whenever we decide that a new object needs to get
> added to the profile panel or the profile menu we'll revert every user
> to this default profile. This barely ever happens, anyway, so it's not a
> big deal. It would be nice though if Gnome would still load the Sabayon
> profile first, then apply user-specific modifications on top of that
> base profile.

I'm wondering if this is just a case that some of the panel stuff needs to be
marked as mandatory, as opposed to default.  I'll look into this tonight.

Cheers,
Scott

-- 
Scott L. Balneaves | I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me
Systems Department | as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
Legal Aid Manitoba |     -- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"