autostart spec updates/extensions

[Rodrigo Moya]

On Fri, 2006-09-22 at 17:11 -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> 2. Immutability / Lockdown
> 
> We want some way for the administrator to lock down certain aspects of
> autostart. (Eg, "you can't remove this app from the startup items
> list".)
> 
> KDE already has a widely-used system for marking part or all of a
> .desktop file immutable, and that gets used by their autostart system
> already, so there's a strong argument for just adopting that.
> 
> Basically the system is:
> 
> 	- if a key has [$i] at the end of the name, it's immutable
> 	  (can't be changed or deleted)
> 	- if a group name has [$i] after it (eg, [Desktop Entry][$i]),
> 	  the whole group is immutable (no keys can be changed, added,
> 	  or deleted)
> 	- if the file has [$i] as its first group name, the whole file
> 	  is immutable
> 
from using the autostart mechanism for a few months now, and having got
some feedback from users, it seems to me we only want to lock the whole
file, thus having a Locked=true|false property would be enough. That is,
why would you want to allow the user to change the Exec line but not
Hidden, for instance? Admins, at least from my experience, usually just
want to force the app to always be started, or just allow the user to
disable it, and for that we just need that Locked=true|false

Also, for the lockdown, we need to sort out what to do when the user
puts a file with the same name of a locked system-wide .desktop file, in
his ~/.config/autostart. Should the user's file be used in place of the
system-wide? Or, should the system-wide, when locked, have precedence
over the user's changes?
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo at gnome-db.org>