Ok, so it's getting a little boring to be making a potential OS but not have an application installation mechanism =) I've been thinking about this, and in particular what https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QTgxakyUVFMkvr-xFY2Xg9lYjcJLd6kPTl3Ij5_dL7Q/edit calls the "Search Path Problem".
New mechanisms to download application blobs aren't super interesting until we attempt to address this. The core issue is we don't want to toss out centralized management. Concretely for example, an admin should be able to get a unified view of all of the gsettings schemas, for the system and for each app. But here's what's making my head spin a bit - assuming we have per-user application installation (and we should), does the system support having an admin construct the schema search path just for that user? Like: # whoami root # gsettings list-recursively --for-user=walters ... ? Or would we just say that in order to get a view of the environment for user walters, you just log in via e.g. "runuser walters", and run gsettings there? The downside of that is - how would you do mandatory controls on a per-user installed application? You'd be putting a key into /etc/dconf that the system dconf is unaware of. Maybe it won't complain... And here's an additional level of complexity - say we want to do something Android-like and isolate applications from each other. Then the system will need to be able to construct the Search Path for pairs of (Application, User), as well as the merged view of all applications for a given User. Other projects trying to move forward in this area just have per-user Search Paths, effectively set on login. That's not too terrible as long as the parts that need to be live monitored are. This is really what the XDG basedir allows now. Anyways; it's kind of tempting to just set up a builder that drops out zip files or something that unpack per-user into ~/.local to at least have *something*... _______________________________________________ gnome-os-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-os-list
