Re: preferences api

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 16 Aug 2004, at 11:18, David Wetzel wrote:

> hi pete,
>
> how about creating a default setting somewhere under the GNUstep home 
> dir and if the current user
> does not have a home, those settings are READ ONLY for them.
> That way, you can create defaults for all the system users.

But not if you want different users to have different defaults.
The existing code can be configured to work for users without home 
directories,
but there is no way we can have a solution which will work 
'out-of-the-box' for every possible situation.
It's not hard to set an environment variable and create a setup for 
things to work even for such odd
situations as running GNUstep applications under accounts which are 
deliberately set up as sandboxes
for particular non-gnustep apps, but it would be nice to make it 
easier, even if a solution with no
configuration at all is impossible.


eg.
At present, you would set the environment variable -
GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT=/usr/GNUstep/pseudo-roots/nobody
and in that directory we have -
1. symbolic links to everything normally in the system root directory
2. a GNUsteprc file containing the lines -
GNUSTEP_DEFAULTS_ROOT=/usr/GNUstep/pseudo-roots/nobody/Defaults
and
FORCE_DEFAULTS_ROOT
3. a Defaults subdirectory usable by user 'nopbody'

In an improved system, you might just edit GNUsteprc to contain a line 
like
GNUSTEP_DEFAULTS_ROOT_nobody=/usr/GNUstep/pseudo-roots/nobody
and create and set appropriate ownership/protection on the named 
directory.