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custom configuraton of KDE and KDE-apps (WAS Re: menu handling by cdd-common)



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On 2004-04-17 12:28, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Apr 2004, Cosimo Alfarano wrote:
> This also brings up the question, whether our stuff works with KDE ...
>
> Any educated KDE people around?

I've been meaning to look into howto do KDE-customization for a while, and 
finally got around to it. The good news is that KDE gives us the means to 
do this right :-), by which I mean without touching other packages' files, 
and allowing the combination of different customizations in a 
straightforward manner.

First some background on how KDE finds it's recources (including 
configuration and .desktop files for the menu) [1]:

  KDE expects it's resources to be part of directory tree with a fixed
  structure. However you can tell KDE to look in and combine more then one
  such tree. In fact by default there are 2: the systemwide one in /usr, and
  the user-specific one in ~/.kde.

  The trees are combined in order of precedence. In case of conflict the
  tree with the highest precedence takes precedence (LOL, sounds rather
  obvoius phrased like that :)

  For configurationfiles a conlict means the some configkey being present
  in more then 1 tree. For everything else a conflict means the same file
  being present in more thenone tree.

  The tree's to combine are specified to KDE using the environment variables
  $KDEHOME and $KDEROOTHOME (to specify the user-changeable tree for
  respectively normal users and root), $KDEDIR (the default user-wide tree),
  and $KDEDIRS (give a list of tree's to be combined seperated by colons,
  precedence is determined by the order in which they are listed, with the
  first listed tree having the highest precedence, if absent $KDEDIR is
  used).

  KDE expects the .desktop files for the menu in the
  'tree-root/share/appplnk' directory for each tree, (custom configuration
  files should be in 'tree-root/share/config')

- -> Basicly you only need to create an additional tree for each CDD-role (one 
package per role?) and set the KDEDIRS variable correctly for each user.

Some things I think are missing now:
1. a standard way to associate roles with a user (possibly roles of
    different CDD's)

2. a tool to determine the precedence order of among the available roles:
  - each CDD should specify some default order for the roles of that CDD
  - easy mode where all roles of CDD-A get precedence over all roles of
    CDD-B
  - advanced mode where you can specify the precedence of roles of all
    installed CDD's as any desired order.

3. set the KDEDIRS variable according to the precedence determined by the
    tool of 2, and the roles that apply to the user 

1,2 would be for the CDD-common package, 3 probably needs  to be done when 
by the startkde-script when cdd-common is installed, and 4 should probably 
go in a CDD-dev package.

Thoughts?

[1] a more complete description can be found at
     http://www.kde.org/areas/sysadmin/fsh.php
- --
cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis):
    Coördinator Belgisch Skolelinux team
    Coördinator Nederlandse Skolelinux vertaling
Skolelinux België - http://i18n.skolelinux.no/belgium
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