[sugar] gconf woes

[Michael Stone]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 05:14:28PM +0000, Daniel Drake wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The problem is that the sugar module imports try to read the XO
>nickname, colours, etc, information which is now stored in gconf. But,
>gconf is a per-user thing, everyone has their own store. 

How about making a copy (either via cp ... or mount --bind -o ro ...) of
the gconf state available to the activity before it starts?

>Rainbow launches activities as different users, so with the default
>behaviour we cannot expect activities to be able to access sugar's
>configuration.

We should distinguish between reading that configuration and writing to
it. We should also distinguish between writing system-wide configuration
and per-activity configuration. Are any parts of the gconf configuration
data sensitive? Does gconf offer any support for such niceties?

>Potential workaround: set ORBIT_SOCKETDIR=/tmp/orbit-olpc in rainbow,
>and loosen permissions on /tmp/orbit-olpc/*
>This works, but causes gconf to complain loudly that /tmp/orbit-olpc
>is not owned by the current user (i.e. the one running the activity)
> ...
>Tomeu raised the point that GConf2-dbus would solve this, as it
>provides a per-session-bus settings repository, rather than a per-user
>one. Rainbow already shares the session bus between olpc user and
>activities. 

Rainbow only shares the session bus between the olpc user and activities
because it was necessary to do so in order to achieve anything, not
because it's a good idea. Good ideas are more than welcome. 

What should actually be going on here?

Michael