Elektra backend for KDE

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 21 February 2006 10:59, Zack Rusin wrote:
> I think we had a discussion before about relaying on environment
> variables too much in the past ;)

yes, for situations where third parties need to extend them at application 
installation time (e.g. XDG_*_DIRS). this is a different situation.

> Do we consider the following scenario a problem: Kiosk settings are
> being propagated from the backend specified in the environment
> variable, user sets the variable to something that doesn't exists
> (non-existing ldap backend, non-existing directory, whatever) and gets
> control over the full installation. Is that an issue? 

once they are set for the X session, they can't adjust them. they could get to 
a terminal and change them for applications run from that command line, but 
one can also block access to the command line. it's pretty safe in that 
regard.

a global config file for this would be even more safe, and i did consider it, 
but that would result in more hits to disk (== slower), something i'm hoping 
to avoid as much as possible here.

> But as far as configuration goes I still think KConfig needs work. We

agreed.

> need something that allows monitoring changes (in the same way that
> right now we use DCOP to broadcast magic signals when something
> changes) and has global knowledge of desktop configuration.

yes. another item that helios and i have been discussing is the idea of 
location/network dependant settings.

e.g. my laptop at home needs different settings from my laptop at the 
office[1]. when i'm on the road i may need yet further changes. it would be 
nice to have the concept of "locations" such that one can provide 
location-specific settings. this ought to be fairly straightforward to 
provide by adding at new directory such as $KDEHOME/share/location-config or 
somesuch, and then having a directory for each location under that directory 
(so, home/, office/, road/, $WHATEVER/) and when the user selects "I'm at 
home" then prepend $KDEHOME/share/location-config/home/ to the search path 
for configs.

helios has also been talking of automatic revision control for the file-based 
backends.

[1] yeah, so my home and my office are the same right now. just go with it for 
the sake of the example ;P
 
-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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