Requirements and pre-analysis for a cross desktop configuration infrastructure

[Philip Van Hoof]

On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 21:15 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

And after learning from the post of Bart Cornelis, I'll add this:

> The backend  needs to support default settings which are stored on a for
> the users  read-only  location. For  example: the  user  settings go  in
> $HOME/.dconf/ and the defaults go in /etc/dconf/default/.

- It looks like GConf has support for read-only keys. But I haven't seen
- it being used.

It needs to be possible to let an authenticated user or an authenticated
other daemon  (read  more  about  scaling and ACAP above) set  a  key to
read-only (and then clear it). This basically  means  that  the value of
that key will be read/cached from the default  source.  Which  can  be a
source thats not located on the host (reading it over ACAP).  Again, for
this, some form of authentication and ACL's are necessary.

Typical places that need such systems: kiosks, large companies with many
client-hosts. The configuration of all desktops is often in the hands of
the  IT  department of that company (who have the authentication to push
changes to clients).

This scalability  shouldn't  bloat  the  software  that  runs  on  every
desktop (My first idea is to use small connectors and a new  application
to handle passing messages between different daemons).



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, Software Developer @ Cronos
home: me at freax dot org
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