Re: Building the default desktop

On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 10:31:07PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > Question 2:
> > -----------
> > I'm working with a ton of users.  Not all users will be using gnome, but
> > it is not predictable to me which ones will and which ones will not, so
> > I can't prime their accounts with stuff.  (Well, that is part of why.) 
> > This is why I'll do as much as I can from within the gconf defaults &&
> > mandatory settings.
> > 
> > If a user has not reconfigured their panels, and I add a launcher to one
> > of the default panels later, will they pick that up?
> > 
> > If that is a yes, then, if they do change some details about the panels,
> > but leave the panel itself there (but maybe add or remove launchers from
> > the default panel config), will my added launcher show up?
> 
> I believe the answer is that if they've logged in with GNOME their
> panel will have been saved, and that includes a list of launchers on
> it. So if you add a launcher it won't be in the list and they won't
> see it.

Yes that is right.  The set of applets/objects is one long list, once it gets
set on disk, you can't add/remove launchers.

This may be mitigated by having two lists for the set of applets/objects.
One which has "default" applets and is never written by the panel and one
which has the current set of applets.  (then you'd also need a way to mark
some of the ones from the "default" set to be deleted, perhaps a third
list).  This way the sysadmin could maintain the default list of
applets/objects and the user could add/remove their applets/objects
and changes to the default set would still be picked up.

I think this would be a very useful thing as part of the whole lockdown
framework.  If you'd lock the "removed defaults" list then you'd disallow
removing of default applets.

Same could be done for panels.  Mark, any thoughts on this?  (Obviously this
is post 2.4 :)

We could even make a script to make it easy to maintain a set of
mandatory/default launchers.  Without fussing schemas and defaults by
hand.

George

-- 
George <[email protected]>
   - I'm getting better!
   - No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
                       -- Monty Python