FC4 Suggestion: Dynamically Generated "role based" menus

[Hewitt,William P - JSC]

It would be kinda useful/interesting if one could generate the menu
system dynamically based on a role variable..... Basically an XML "if"
statement and an extra field in the ".desktop" files.....

I have been deploying a test group of "ordinary" users with very
different skill sets and computing requirements - it would be nice to be
able to eliminate menu items for some of these individuals (like the 80
year old woman that only uses email, word processing and the internet)
and still provide the set of administrative menus for the "root" account
and provide access to the programming applications to a programmer,
games to the kiddies, etc.... Yes I know you can build separate
instances for different users, but it would save a great deal of time
and eliminate the "human error" factor if this could be done globally
and transparently during the install/initialization.... Perhaps with
just another keyword in the xml definition? Dont know and I am just
throwing this out there... Perhaps there is alrady something like this
in place.

Any thoughts?


WPH

[Matthew Miller]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 10:04:48AM -0800, William Hewitt wrote:
>  It would be kinda useful/interesting if one could generate the menu
>  system dynamically based on a role variable..... Basically an XML "if"
>  statement and an extra field in the ".desktop" files..... 
[...]
>  and transparently during the install/initialization.... Perhaps with
>  just another keyword in the xml definition? Dont know and I am just
>  throwing this out there... Perhaps there is alrady something like this
>  in place.
>  Any thoughts? 
Sounds like a decent idea. I think it'd be nicest if it could be based on
(unix) group membership.

This is probably a suggestion for upstream Gnome....

-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm(a)mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>