[systemd-devel] [PATCH] [RFC]logind: set locale in user sessions

[Bastien Nocera]

On Sun, 2013-01-06 at 00:08 +0100, Tom Gundersen wrote:
> Hi Bastien,
> 
> On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:36 PM, Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2013-01-04 at 11:23 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> >> Lennart Poettering (lennart at poettering.net) said:
> >> > Bill Nottingham (notting at redhat.com) said:
> >> > > FWIW, GNOME stores this in the accounts service, outside of the user's
> >> > > configuration heirarchy entirely, for access from the display manager and
> >> > > other mechanisms.
> >> >
> >> > Does gdm actually use that? Old versions used to have a language
> >> > drop-down box. But I don't think new versions still have that?
> >
> > It's necessary to have that outside the user's config option to allow
> > gdm to read it to set the upcoming session's locale, allow other users
> > to see the languages used by others (used in the Region & Language
> > panel, where the other users' languages are prominent choices), and
> > allow changing the user's language by the system administration tools
> > (used in the User Accounts panel).
> 
> I have played around a bit with AccountsService (not being a GNOME
> user I had not
> tried it before), and have a couple of questions:
> 
> 1) Is the storage format documented anywhere? Is it meant only to be internal to
> AccountsService, or could other services in principle use the config
> files directly?

The storage is internal to Accountsservice, you should use the D-Bus API
instead.

> 3) How do you deal with user accounts being accessed from different
> machines? Assuming
> /home is shared and /var is not, I'm struggling to see how storing
> user-config in /var can work
> (though I could not find any documentation, so it is entirely possible
> I'm missing something
> obvious).

We don't. Depending on your setup, I would share
the /var/lib/AccountsService/ directory through NFS.

Though that doesn't solve the case where the system is managed, and
users are listed in LDAP for example. I don't know how to solve that
problem unless you modify the GNOME bits to talk to the LDAP server.