Autostarting unwanted gnome applets

[Oron Peled]

On Wednesday, 21 בJanuary 2009, Rex Dieter wrote:
> (We're still trying to come up with a way to be able to use both, ie, 
> have kpackagekit disable gpk-update-icon when it is installed, but it 
> doesn't work yet, and may never.  boo :( )

If it was an install-time problem, it could have been solved via
alternatives(8). However, the biggest problem is that on the same
system we may have both KDE/GNOME installed (that's what I do)
and each user login to her preferred desktop environment.

This means we have a login-time personal decision. The
trick proposed by freeslkr solves this but it doesn't
feel like a systematic solution.

For end users, this is far from intuitive and without GUI
wrappers would force them to edit the desktop files instead
of adding/removing files/links which is easier and less error prone.

Also, system-administrators who want to set system-wide preferences
for autostart would need to edit the contents of these files which
is not the best thing (rpmverify anybody?)

IMO, the problem could have a cleaner solution within the current
autostart framework by judicious use of symlinks:
 - All potential desktop files installed to a shared pool. E.g:
     /usr/share/xdg/autostart
 - Have per-desktop and generic directories:
     /etc/xdg/autostart/{KDE,GNOME,FOOBAR,generic}
 - The per-user autostart directories have similar structure:
    ~/.config/autostart/{KDE,GNOME,FOOBAR,generic}
 - The default XDG_CONFIG_DIRS in each desktop (e.g: KDE) is:
     /etc/xdg/autostart/KDE:/etc/xdg/autostart/generic
 - Now a simple symlinking of selected entries in /usr/share/xdg/autostart
   to the wanted directories would achieve the required result.

Advantages:
 - I think it's still consistent with fdo autostart draft standard.
 - Normally only the symlinks need to be created/moved/removed.
 - It's easy to manage with a chkconfig style utility.
 - It's easy to create management GUI for those who need it.
 - desktop file contents are not altered in the common case.
 - But the admin may still have a custom copy of the desktop file
   if needed (e.g: drop it in /etc/xdg/autostart-local and link to
   it from the required desktop directory).

Thoughts?

-- 
Oron Peled                                 Voice: +972-4-8228492
oron at actcom.co.il                  http://www.actcom.co.il/~oron
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