Re: Setting default GNOME settings with XDG_DATA_DIRS

[Camaleón <noelamac@gmail.com>]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2010 17:54:51 -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote:

> On Fri, 2010-08-27 at 17:46 -0400, John A. Sullivan III wrote:
>> On Fri, 2010-08-27 at 21:32 +0000, Camaleón wrote:

>> > Before I'm going nuts with all these dirs ;-), try to set your common
>> > path to both "XDG_DATA_HOME" and "XDG_DATA_DIRS" because
>> > "XDG_DATA_HOME" seems to have the top preference over the rest of the
>> > variables.

(...)

>> Thanks but I think that would be a really bad idea. If I understand it
>> correctly (and I may not), XDG_DATA_HOME points to where the USER
>> settings versus the system settings are stored which is why it has teh
>> highest precedence.  If we repoint it to /data/.Commond/xdg/default,
>> then ~/.local will no longer be searched and, since users do not have
>> write access to the centralized configuration, they will not be able to
>> save their customizations.  I believe XDG_DATA_HOME is used when you
>> want the user settings directory to be something other than the default
>> .local directory.  To manage system wide settings, one uses
>> XDF_DATA_DIRS.  At least so I think - John

Mmm, that makes sense.
 
> I just realized that I should clarify this is a vserver environment with
> a shared file system via mount rbind.  Thus, we can set one xdg
> directory for hundreds of vserver guests rather than editing
> /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/defaults.list on each one of those guests. In a stand
> alone environment, the highest centralization would be
> /etc/gnome-vfs-2.0/defaults.list.

O.k, I get the whole picture. You want to have the following priorities:

1. First look for custom wide settings path
→ if not present
2. Look for defaults wide settings path
→ if not present
3. Set the user's path
 
> So the question remains, how do we make our central defaults.list a
> higher priority than the one in /usr/share/gnome/applications? 

Then we only can play with 2 variables:

$XDG_DATA_DIRS → data path
$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS → config file path

The fisrt one is already set but seems to have not effect (it is still 
looking for "/usr/share/gnome/applications/defaults.list" and the second 
one is for configuration files... so, what we are missing here? I don't 
think it is required an additional command to populate the changes >:-?

Greetings,

-- 
Camaleón