Possible values for Channels/Properties in xfconf‏ (Plain Text)

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:26:03 +1100 Michael Primrose wrote:

> 
> Is it possible to determine what the complete set of possible already
> defined channels/properties are with respect to xfconf in XFCE4.6?

Nope.

> I would presume that the complete answer is to go through
> the code for XFCE4.6 and find where the various channels and related
> properties are defined.

Yep.

> This exercise, whilst interesting in its own
> right, is rather time consuming.

Yeah :-(

> I am rather hoping that there is a
> document somewhere that lists all the channels/properties that have
> been so far defined for XFCE4.6, but if the document does exist
> anywhere on the web, it has so far eluded my search techniques.

No, I don't believe there is.  But someone might start one on
wiki.xfce.org if they were so inclined...

The "problem" is that Xfconf doesn't have the concept of "schemas," at
least not in the same way that (e.g.) gconf does.  You can specify
system-wide defaults for any property you want, but the system doesn't
*require* that you do so like gconf (effectively) does.  So an app is
free to set whatever properties it wants, without documenting them,
and you could even create and set arbitrary meaningless properties that
do nothing from the command-line or GUI editor.

> I
> realize that, from reading the documentation, I can create whatever
> channels and properties I wish, so long as they follow the standards
> already set. However, there is a large step from having a freshly
> minted property oin a channel of your own naming, and actually geting
> it to do anything sensible on the system. Hence my interest finding
> out about the potential channels/properties that may already be in
> existence, but are so far un-utilized, so we can do some
> experimentation with them, in the Zenwalk community and see what this
> tool can be made to do. If it does nothing more than to finally
> provide us with fine grained control in the XFCE Kiosk environment
> then the tool will be extremely useful, but the tool seems capable of
> so much more.

You could indeed implement a kiosk-like system on top of xfconf using
property locking.  Unfortunately, the locking code is very very
untested and may not even work (no Xfce components use it directly,
though sysadmins might want to, of course).

My hope was to be able to replace XfceKiosk entirely with xfconf, but
currently it's a bit cumbersome to use as it is now without some kind
of kiosk-related wrapper on top.

> Sorry about the previous post. I hadnt realized how the default
> hotmail settings whould appear. Hopefully this should be more
> presentable

No worries... these things happen sometimes.

	-b