Tue 2008/Aug/26

• Predefined desktop items for Nautilus

  Back in the Summer of Code 2007, Sayamindu Dasgupta worked on adding support for predefined desktop items to Nautilus. This is so that system administrators can set up desktop links that will appear on users' desktops. A university could set up an icon to take people to the university's intranet, for example.

  Basically, I'm reviving Sayamindu's patch and bringing it up to date for the current Nautilus. The idea is that you set up a GConf key, /apps/nautilus/desktop/predefined_items_dir, and point it to a directory which holds .desktop files. This kind of indirection through a GConf key is what makes the scheme work nicely for deployments with Sabayon: sysadmins can have predefined items for various groups of users, and select among those by simply changing a mandatory GConf key for each user. This wouldn't be so easy if there were a hardcoded directory like /var/nautilus/global-desktop-items.

  Sysadmins should be able to define mandatory items, which users cannot change or delete, and also "normal" items, which users can tweak or remove. Mandatory ones would be ones like "Company Intranet" or "Link to Helpdesk". Distros could use normal items for their marketing materials; the perenially hacky "Welcome to FooLinux" icons that currently are hard to do properly.

  The problem I'm having is how to make non-mandatory items work. You want this behavior:

  1. The sysadmin defines a non-mandatory item.
  2. The user sees the item in his desktop. He doesn't want it anymore, so he deletes it. Where do we mark this deletion?
  3. The user decides that he wants the item back after all. How does he restore it?
  4. The sysadmin updates the non-mandatory item and he wants it to show up again in people's desktops. How can this override what the user had done?

  I'm leaning toward having two extra boolean values in .desktop files: an X-GNOME-Mandatory and X-GNOME-Deleted. If the "mandatory" value is false, then the user may change or delete the item. For changes, the item is copied from the predefined_items_dir to the user's ~/Desktop and that version is modified. For deletions, the item is copied there as well, but then the "deleted" flag gets turned on.

  If the user wants an item back, he turns on "show hidden files" and those files get shown again. (Or we could hack the Trash to restore the item by turning off the "deleted" flag...)

  If the sysadmin updates an item in the predefined_items_dir, this item will override items of the same name in users' desktops, based on the item's timestamp.

  Does this make sense? Am I overlooking something?

Syndicated 2008-08-26 11:42:00 from Federico Mena-Quintero - Activity Log