Re: Major problem with gconf mandatory settings.

Hi Marcin,

    This is what mandatory in gconf has been designed to do.
    The question is should GCONF provide a API sho that the applications 
know that the key is not settable and therefore desensitize the menu 
item, is that what you are thinking about?

-Ghee

Marcin Antczak wrote:

> Recently I was learning about gconf and found information about 
> mandatory settings.
>
> This is very important GConf feature - very usable for administrators 
> etc. But this implies a major bug in almost all gnome applications 
> with gconf support.
>
>
> My english is poor so simple CLI example:
>
> gconftool-2 --direct --config-source 
> xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory/ --type string --set 
> /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /home/marcin/ncube-1600.jpg
>
> And now every user has wallpaper set to /home/marcin/ncube-1600.jpg - 
> just because root wants to.
>
> This is nice but then user can run application called 
> gnome-background-properties and can try to change wallpaper.
>
> But wallpaper will not change because user settings are overriden with 
> mandatory settings - while user _will not have an idea about this_.
> And propably will think that gnome-background-properties is just broken.
>
>
> The problem is that this scenario can be applied in any application - 
> for example in eog we can in mandatory settings turn off toolbar - and 
> user can try to turn on toolbar in "view" menu to the end of time...
>
> In my opinion this is a serious "structural" bug in gnome preferences 
> system.
>
> And I'am writing about this here because I don't know where exactly 
> report this as a bug - gconf bug? Or maybe prepare a hundred of bug 
> reports for each application that uses gconf?
>
> I think that this has to be resolved - and I suppose that solution 
> should be "centralized" - some kind of notification system, but I'm 
> not C developer only system administrator and user.
> And I'm asking for an advise - what do you think what to do with this?
>
>
> Marcin Antczak
>
>
>
>
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