Hi Yann,
On Tue, 2013-07-23 at 09:13 +0200, Yann Bane wrote:
I've already sent an email to Toshio Kuratomi, but he hasn't
replied
so I'll try to ask my questions here...
I'm not sure why you'd send that to Toshio, as far as I know he's not
involved with GNOME at all.
I'm a person who often switches distributions and PCs. I was
wondering
whether it would be viable to create a GNOME program that would scan
the computer for settings (mostly GNOME settings), and allow the user
to export the settings to a file (and maybe cloud storage). It would
also allow importing of such files. Maybe it wouldn't only work just
for the DE, but for programs such as Firefox as well, but I haven't
thought it trough yet...
You could just backup the ~/.config folder?
These days, most settings are in there, at least for GNOME stuff:
https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders
1. Does such a thing already exist for GNOME or GNU/Linux? Other
desktops? Other operating systems?
Not that I know of.
Although there are backup programs (like Deja Dup) which save both data
and configs, and can upload it to the cloud, an extrernal hard drive,
etc...
2. If so, why isn't it included in GNOME and advertised as
something
you must have?
Because most people wouldn't ever need it.
3. If it doesn't - is there a specific reason? Has someone
already
tried implementing it but failed? Are there some not obvious obstacles
that make this sort of thing unpractical or impossible? Is it maybe
just not as useful as it seems?
We're not experts in Linux history here, so you'll have to search a
bit. :)
Or, you know, just try. ;)
4. If I were to develop it and make it reasonably useful and usable,
how likely is it that the app gets included in the default GNOME or
Fedora system? (I mean, considering how much useless crap is already
preinstalled, that wouldn't seem to be a big issue...)
For GNOME, you'd have to ask on desktop-devel-list I'd say:
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Fedora pretty much follows upstream GNOME, so I don't think the default
desktop would include something like that if GNOME upstream were against
it.
In any case, you should really ask that upstream first.
--
Mathieu