autostart spec, round 2!

[Dan Winship]

On Mon, 2006-10-23 at 19:33 +0200, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> Vincent Untz wrote:
> >"I want to change some autostart programs. Let's put them in
> >/usr/local/etc/xdg/autostart and modify XDG_CONFIG_DIRS so they have a
> >higher priority. Hrm, why doesn't it work? Why would this $£#{ use
> >/etc/xdg/autostart when I explicitly tell to user /usr/local/etc/xdg
> >first!"
> >
> >It looks correct according to what we described in this thread, but it's
> >not what sysadmins will expect in this specific case.
> 
> I'd argue that since this is the way Kiosk has worked for several years, 
> it is the way sysadmins would expect.

Well, it's what KDE sysadmins would expect. But if you've never used
kiosk, and just read the XDG base dirs spec and the autostart spec, then
you're left with files in "less important" directories overriding files
in "more important" directories, which is definitely confusing.

> Especially since environment variables aren't locked down. You can easily 
> change $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS. Setting it or adding [$i] to some files isn't 
> equal to system lockdown.

Yeah, I realized that when I read Vincent's message too. I'm starting to
wonder if there are actually cases where freedesktop-autostart lockdown
would be useful. (It seems like in order to make it not trivially
hack-around-able, you have to lock down enough other things that there's
no need to lock down autostart too, because there wouldn't be any way to
modify startup at that point anyway.)

-- Dan