MCS design proposal

[Diego Ongaro]

On 7/8/07, Stephan Arts <stephan at xfce.org> wrote:
>
> It is in Xfce < 4.6, but perhaps it would be a good idea to centralize
> the Kiosk settings inside a *new* MCS.
>
> This would make sure that individual applications do not need to worry
> about it, and Kiosk-mode will work with *all* settings stored via MCS.
> Theoretically, it would be possible to determine if a user is allowed
> to change his workspace-margins between certain boundaries. I know
> this is far fetched, but it is just to illustrate the general idea.
>
> Personally, I like the idea of Kiosk-mode placed inside the mcs-manager.
>
>
> Cheers,
> Stephan

Instead of having Kiosk-mode define which settings can be modified
across the entire schema, it might less painful to have applications
define a kiosk-danger parameter for each setting, as follows:

The kiosk-danger parameter might be a range from 0-5 representing the
"danger" that modifying this setting would cause in a kiosk
environment. For example on the xfce4-places-plugin, changing the
label presented on the panel would have a fairly high danger level,
since a bad label could offend kiosk users. However, whether to show
removable media or not is less dangerous. Then, the kiosk manager
could specify the kiosk-danger *threshold* as a number between 0 and 5
depending on his/her particular environment and level of trust (e.g.,
allow changing any setting with a kiosk-danger threshold <= 3).

I present this concept because it brings more flexibility to
application developers and kiosk managers. The application developers
will intimately know what their settings do, and thus should be able
to provide reasonable kiosk-danger parameters with minimal guidance.
Thus, installing a new third-party application would impose no further
kiosk-related work for the kiosk manager.

-Diego Ongaro