Ikke's Blog

Just thought of this:
Imagine a program that allows you to tar up settings etc. You run it, it takes a snapshot of your Gconf settings, your Gnome application settings in .gnome2, your current GTK+ theme, your Metacity theme, your icon theme,... i.e. all possible settings related to your Gnome desktop, and maybe even more things (as a plugin) like Mozilla Firefox preferences, Openoffice settings,... It takes all this, and makes a nice tarball out of it which you can take to some other machine, run some tool, feed it with the tarball, and all at once you got the exactly same environment as on the first machine...

I've been thinking of this 'caus I installed Ubuntu Linux at VTK the other day on one workstation, and I hated it to be forced to reconfigure every application the way I want them. Just grabbing the settings of my workstation here and applying them there would be so cool.

I know I could just tar -cjvf ~/.somedirectoriesandfiles, but that's no "nice" solution, and could (next to other things) corrupt the existing Gconf keys, Firefox profiles etc.

I just launched the idea on #gnome@GIMPNet, one possible problem that's been mentioned is hard-coded paths (e.g. in Gconf keys). The settings application should be smart enough to find these things, and check if the specified file exists. If not, the key should not be created, and the application using the kay should create it or get it from the Gconf defaults (that's just the way applications should work with Gconf. If they don't, they're not 100% Gconf-enabled/valid).

This is not easy to write, although when coding step by step, one should be able to get it working.

RealNitro: wouldn't this be some nice Python project? File handling, string parsing, Gconf bindings, even using PyGTK one day... If you'd like to take a look at this, I'd be glad to join and learn some more Python at the same time :-)

FOSDEM tomorrow and Sunday. I hope I'll get there (on Sunday preferably).

Ikke • Technology, Linux, Desktop 3 comments