Debian gconf policy

[Johannes Rohr <j.rohr@gmx.de>]

Hello,

I've been working on the nautilus-media package that Emil has prepared.
(My revised package is available at
deb http://home.arcor.de/debian/unstable/ ./ )
It includes gst-thumbnail that generates thumbnails of video files for
nautilus' icon view.

Since totem offers the same funtionality, Michael Dänzer suggested
earlier, that on deinstallation nautilus-media should restore the
respective gconf keys to make totem the default thumbnailer application
for videos again.

The only workaround I found for this was, to let debconf ask the user at
configuration time whether or not to use gst-thumbnail. If not, the
registration of the schemas file for gst-thumbnail is skipped.

But I think that this is a dirty hack. The nautilus-media package is
unaware of whether or not totem is installed. So it asks this question
even if no other thumbnailing application for video files is installed.

I wonder if there is a better and more general way to address this kind
of issues. There may be other cases where several packages want to
manipulate the same gconf key. In such a case, shouldn't there be a way
of backing up old gconf settings in order to restore them later, when a
package is uninstalled? Or maybe several applications could use shared
debconf templates, to keep them aware of the presence of a "competitor"
package. I think that the different available display managers (wdm,
kdm, gdm, xdm) are managed in such a manner.

Is there already a kind of Debian gconf policy available anywhere that
addresses these issues?

Thanks,

Johannes

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