Right click a property to set as default, mandatory, etc?

[Dylan McCall]

(Moderators: Sorry, I absent-mindedly attached those files when I should
have uploaded them somewhere. I'll just send this again and hope you see
this before confirming my last message!)


I was playing with Blender 2.5 and felt really jealous of its awesome
new feature where one can right click a property (ANY property) and
insert a keyframe for it. Unfortunately, we don't get keyframes in the
GNOME desktop, but we do have default and mandatory gconf keys :)

Has anyone explored the possibility of adding / extending the context
menus for gnome-control-center's gconf property editor widgets, adding
"Set default" and "Set mandatory" options? Given that these widgets are
linked to things in gconf, that could be pretty slick and magical. The
result would be much easier fine-grained system administration for
everybody and a wonderful demonstration of why gconf is a good thing.

I'm tempted to take a shot at it myself. I did get the right click so
far on some widgets (the ones that aren't eating my events...) and I
made a feeble attempt at getting it to actually do stuff when I choose
things on the menu. I'll need to give this a bit of love to make it work
well, so I feel it would be best to ask around if this is even a
sensible thing to do :)
Here are some unexciting screenshots, just to be sure we are on the same
page:
http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4710/screenshotappearancepre.png
http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/7985/screenshotassistivetech.png


Thanks,
Dylan McCall


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[Federico Mena Quintero]

On Thu, 2009-10-01 at 08:03 -0700, Dylan McCall wrote:

> Has anyone explored the possibility of adding / extending the context
> menus for gnome-control-center's gconf property editor widgets, adding
> "Set default" and "Set mandatory" options? Given that these widgets are
> linked to things in gconf, that could be pretty slick and magical. The
> result would be much easier fine-grained system administration for
> everybody and a wonderful demonstration of why gconf is a good thing.

Wow, that's a pretty elegant way to present things.

Have you used Sabayon?  It lets sysadmins configure which GConf keys are
default/mandatory using a clunkier interface (you select those options
from a list of keys-that-you-have-changed).  Your method is a lot more
direct.  It would be sweet if your menu "happened" automatically
whenever you run a Gnome session under Sabayon.

  Federico

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[Vincent Untz]

Le jeudi 01 octobre 2009, à 08:03 -0700, Dylan McCall a écrit :
> Has anyone explored the possibility of adding / extending the context
> menus for gnome-control-center's gconf property editor widgets, adding
> "Set default" and "Set mandatory" options? Given that these widgets are
> linked to things in gconf, that could be pretty slick and magical. The
> result would be much easier fine-grained system administration for
> everybody and a wonderful demonstration of why gconf is a good thing.

It's interesting, and certainly convenient. But if it's not possible to
do for all the relevant widgets, then it might be surprising when it's
not working for users.

Also, this is something that would need to be implemented just not in
the control center, but in all applications that have preferences.
Therefore, it would help if this were implemented at the toolkit level.
Maybe you should talk to Ryan, since all the dconf stuff might have a
chance to be usable from gtk+.

(there's of course the question of whether it makes sense to make this
kind of thing so easily accessible -- for most people, it's not
interesting)

Vincent

--
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.
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[Ryan Lortie]

Hi

GSettings already has some very slight GTK integration: you can bind
widgets to certain keys in the database.  The "integration" part here
comes from the fact that the widget will be set insensitive if the key
is read-only.

As for being able to right click on arbitrary buttons around the desktop
and say "set this as the default" -- that seems weird to me.  I'd be a
lot happier to see you able to run certain applications in a special
mode that allowed for that (maybe some administrator mode set by
environment variable?) or just a mode that is modifying the default
settings instead of the per-user ones (and then a right-click item for
"lock this setting").

Of course there's an interesting problem here:  locking the setting
would cause the widget to appear insensitive which, by my understanding
of GTK, would prevent the delivery of further right-click events.....
Maybe instead of being set insensitive it would rather get a red
background (or such) in "admin mode".

Cheers

On Tue, 2009-10-06 at 16:01 +0200, Vincent Untz wrote:

> Le jeudi 01 octobre 2009, à 08:03 -0700, Dylan McCall a écrit :
> > Has anyone explored the possibility of adding / extending the context
> > menus for gnome-control-center's gconf property editor widgets, adding
> > "Set default" and "Set mandatory" options? Given that these widgets are
> > linked to things in gconf, that could be pretty slick and magical. The
> > result would be much easier fine-grained system administration for
> > everybody and a wonderful demonstration of why gconf is a good thing.
>
> It's interesting, and certainly convenient. But if it's not possible to
> do for all the relevant widgets, then it might be surprising when it's
> not working for users.
>
> Also, this is something that would need to be implemented just not in
> the control center, but in all applications that have preferences.
> Therefore, it would help if this were implemented at the toolkit level.
> Maybe you should talk to Ryan, since all the dconf stuff might have a
> chance to be usable from gtk+.
>
> (there's of course the question of whether it makes sense to make this
> kind of thing so easily accessible -- for most people, it's not
> interesting)
>
> Vincent
>

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