phononserver phonondevicesrc OpenFlag, askToRemove

[Edgar Fuß]

I hope I'm right on this list with my question.

Is there a reason for phononserver.cpp to open the phonondevicesrc config file with KConfig::SimpleConfig, not ::NoGlobals?

Why would anybody care? Because installed hardware is a system option, not a user preference?

The real story is somewhat longer.
We (Uni Bonn Maths) run some 150 computers using KDE as the desktop.
>From a user's point of view, all machines are equal. All have the same codebase installed, home directories are on NFS. Five persons in an office share three computers, people log in to a computer in the printer room, a professor logs in to his secretary's machine etc.
Of course, computers are not equal from a hardware point of view. So, if switching between non-identical machines, KDE will ``inform'' users that his sound cards got removed.
My idea around that was to list all possible sound cards in /etc/kde4/phonondevicesrc and mark them as hotpluggable. However, that is undermined by phononserver using the ~/.kde/share/config/phonondevicesrc configuiration exclusively.

Patching phononserver.cpp to open with ::NoGlobals seems to work. But is this the right thing to do? Would it be better to have some configuration option in a phononserverrc (or kdeglobals to start with) not to complain about vanishing sound cards or those matching a pattern?

Ignoring the message by putting it in a global kdedrc seems not to be an option:
1. You still get ``informed'' that a warning was surpressed.
2. We would need to put n*m messages (n sound cards times m localizations, currently n=26 and m around 6) in there. Also, this seems volatile wrt. re-phrasing of messages.

Comments welcome.