some changes for (slightly) faster boot

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 21:36 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Sure you can have every user redefine every single parameter - but even
> if users with different tastes do happen very frequently, the vast
> majority of cases will be users sharing the same customisations (because
> of the site/corporate policy, or there is only one computer-addict in
> the family, etc). This is BTW one of GConf biggest weaknesses right now
> - it's easy to change things on a per-user basis, but much less so on a
> per-system (or per-group) one, unless you want to dig into GConf
> internals and fight your distribution idea of what the defaults should
> be.

You shouldn't have to fight the distribution if you do it properly
(granted "properly" isn't necessarily obvious); the distribution
defaults are in the schemas and the site-local defaults should be set as
the values themselves. 

There are plans to make it simpler:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/plans.html
but I believe it works fine now once you figure it out.

To set a default do something like:
  gconftool-2 --direct --config-source=xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults --set /apps/metacity/general/reduced_resources true

all users should then get reduced_resources=true by default and AFAIK
Red Hat packages will never overwrite this.

If you run gconf-editor as root and choose "New Defaults Window" and
change stuff there, in principle that's the same as the above command
line.

Making this a bit worse, gnome-panel specifically (which I realize is
the app most people want to set up defaults for) is harder than other
apps.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gconf-list/2003-December/msg00007.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gconf-list/2003-December/msg00012.html

Havoc