GDM Greeter

[Christopher L Tubbs II]

Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-29 at 11:25 -0400, Christopher L Tubbs II wrote:
>> Rodd Clarkson wrote:
>> [snip]
>>>> Perhaps the simplest idea, though, is to have gnome-about-me ask the
>>>> user if they'd like to modify home directory permissions to show face on
>>>> desktop, so at least, there's no surprises.
>>> I'm just curious.  Where would you store them (other than the home
>>> directory) that would remain during updates.
>> Well, the images are already stored in the pixmaps directory, so you 
>> just need to store the path (if another path is specified that the 
>> greeter doesn't have permissions for, that's up to the user to make sure 
>> the permissions are correct). The path could be stored in an /etc/passwd 
>> type file (/etc/faces?), with a similar utility to allow each user to 
>> modify his/her own line (gnome-about-me could be modified to do it, but 
>> I'm not sure what this would involve).
>>
>> An alternative approach that would not allow users to modify their own 
>> image is to make the utility that edits the /etc/faces file be 
>> system-config-users. If that was the case, the utility could also have a 
>> checkbox "include in greeter list", along with input box for image path.
>>
>> Personally, I think the decision to have a username in the list is an 
>> administrator one, and the decision for the image is a user one.
> 
> But when I (like many) upgrade from one version of fedora to the next,
> the /home partition is the only thing that is preserved.
> 
> The rest of the file system is replaced with a new one (often including
> a format).  So /etc isn't going to still contain this images.
> 
> I suspect most users (and sysadmins, don't want to have to replace the
> images each time the upgrade and having them in /home is a good place to
> preserve them across installs.
> 
> 
> R.

Perhaps. On the other hand, I would prefer a scheme that doesn't 
compromise home directory permissions, and I don't see .face important 
enough to maintain across installs. On a related issue, /etc/passwd and 
/etc/shadow aren't saved across the type of install that you mentioned 
either, so no matter what, you've still got to recreate something for 
the users... You could argue that an admin might back these up, but most 
admins I know back up all of /etc when doing such an install...

Doing a re-install is an admin job, and setting faces is a user job (and 
one that isn't too important, and not unreasonable to ask the users to 
do again after an install).

Rainman

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