[Kde-kiosk] Preventing unset of default KDE configurations

[Martijn Klingens]

On Friday 27 May 2005 06:16, Taru Jain wrote:
> Thanks for your reply :-) I have a few questions:

Answers inline below :)

> 1) When you say "from KDE 3.2 onwards there are user profiles that are
> controlled through /etc/kderc and no longer rely on environment
> variables." do you mean that the $KDEDIRS will no longer be read by the
> underlying KDE system to determine what is the default configuration??
> or is there any plan to do such a thing in the future version?

Nope. KDEDIRS is still alive and kicking and I'm not aware of any plans to 
remove it. (The old-style singular form $KDEDIR will probably be removed for 
real in KDE 4.)

> 2) On my box I have KDE 3.2.1, and I see in the kde start up script
> that the value of $KDEDIRS is being unset. Is it because of the reason
> stated in the (i) point?

No, IIRC that was a SuSE modification for a number of versions, you can remove 
that line from the script if you like, just make sure it contains valid 
values.

> 3) I wanted to use $KDEDIRS variable rather than user profile because
> the directories listed in the $KDEDIRS have a lower precendence than the
> user profiles. If a setting is *locked* in the default kde configuration
> (specified through $KDEDIRS like /etc/opt/kde3) then the value which I
> would have specified in my profile will not take effect. I want to
> ensure that no matter what my settings should take precendence. So I can
> set my configuration directory before the system defaults in the
> $KDEDIRS variable. But then the problem is that after a user login
> event, this $KDEDIR value can be unset. Is there a way to resolve this?

Yes, don't tamper with the default configuration ;-)

Seriously, the reason why the locking cannot be overridden is that is quite 
complex to add an 'allow override' option to the system in a secure way, and 
without such an option it would be downright dangerous.

As far as I know you can apply multiple profiles at the same time if a user is 
member of multiple groups, so you can apply a profile to a group 'all' and to 
a more restricted group in the order you prefer. At least, I think it's 
possible, I just discovered my kiosktool binary got lost when i moved from 
cvs to svn, so i can't test.

-- 
Martijn