[schaefer at alphanet.ch: Simple system-wide autoconfiguration for GNOME 3]

[Marc SCHAEFER]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 06:58:11PM +0300, Toomas Tamm wrote:
> First, it seems easier to postpone gnome configuration for the time
> after first boot. Then all the necessary daemons are running. There was
> a recent thread on this list on how to run a script at first boot.

Yes, I will do that, at the first user's login using a custom auto-deleted
.xinitrc.  It looks the simpler path.  GNOME 3 seems to be intermixed
with gconf (old), dconf (new) and intermediate (GSettings) registries,
with incompatible formats.  I found a gconf to GSettings migration
tool, where they even recommend to run the migration command at
each login ... (gsettings-data-convert, only working if you write
the appropriate schema conversion files first).

I will also see if DebianLAN has any idea (quickly browsing their
repository I don't see GNOME preconfiguration).

Another path could be dh_dconf (from debian).

But I will live with running gsettings commands at the first user's login,
with the additional benefit that's it's easily testable.

> Still, I have no experience contacting the gsettings daemon when no user
> is logged on.

Data is apparently finally stored to ~user/.config/dconf/user in a DBM or
similar format.  There probably is some system-wide default binary file in
/var somewhere too.  Unfortunately those are binary formats.  One could
write a tool to write there (dconf and gsettings need a daemon, but
if no daemon is there you can certainly write to the file directly), but
then in the next GNOME release they may change the format again :(
gconf had --direct for that purpose.

> If my understanding is correct, the "gconftool-2" configuration
> mechanism is now deprecated and may be removed in future versions. Thus

Yes, and in addition it does only work for keys which are described in
the default schema. It did not work in my case, probably because of the
missing conversion schema for the specific keys.

> around us becoming more and more "interactive" and "user-friendly", we
> may soon have no other options left.

Maybe, but they certainly look unstable and not clearly defined, for
little added benefit.

That's probably why a lot of people are going GNOME 2 (Mate) instead
of 3.

Thank you to you and Thomas Lange for help!