[kde-services-devel] User and System-wide Settings

[Josef Spillner]

On Monday 23 July 2007 11:38:44 Mark Constable wrote:
> I'm just wondering if there is currently, or any interest in, a
> system where user and system-wide config settings can be mirrored
> online ?

There is definitely interest in this. Not necessarily "online" as accessible 
through WWW, but e.g. in companies and other large computer labs having 
central configuration settings is a must-have. For my personal systems, to 
share the work and home PCs/notebooks, I'd go for using my USB stick, which 
is encrypted, doesn't need bandwidth and doesn't expose my data to anyone, 
even if stolen. However I can see the use cases for storing settings online.

> Bookmarks, akregator feeds, mail server settings, custom themes
> and many more settings are a real PITA to have to re-setup
> everytime one re-installs KDE so I am very interested in
> automating the safe mirroring/backup of all such settings.

Using appropriate KConfig backends (e.g. for LDAP) this could be possible at 
some level. However, an alternative would be to keep config files on disk and 
centralise them through versioning systems such as SVN.
User and system roaming was implemented somewhen in KDE 3.x which should make 
it easy to share and migrate configuration profiles.

I just wonder what happens if there are different KDE versions. In our 
university we used to have 3.1 (on Solaris) and 3.4 (on Linux) in parallel, 
which regularly broke either one kicker or the other one, for example, and 
having two ~/.kde dirs was not an option due to limited student quota.

I also wonder if KDE could offer synchronisation tools for non-KDE 
configuration files. From what I know, the PIM tools (opensync etc.) should 
have some code for this, but I've never look at it to be honest.

> Please let me know if kde-services is not the right area to
> pursue this kind of thing.

Well, if it's offered as a service it will clearly be on-topic :-)
In most such integration scenarios there is also a relevant client-side 
mailing list, in this case it would be kde-core-devel as the topics touch 
KConfig and Kiosk to some extent.

Josef