MCS design proposal

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Am Mon, 9 Jul 2007 11:46:22 -0500
schrieb "Diego Ongaro" <ongardie at gmail.com>:

> 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 think that's even more painful than just defining which properties
can be modified in kiosk mode and which are protected. 

> 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.

Well, in your concept applications would have to install their own
properties info file in which the "danger level" of each property is
defined. In the other concept applications would not install anything.
Instead, each system administrator could put the names of all
properties he wants to have protected into one or more files in a
special location and that's it. No need to deal with different levels
etc. Just let the admins decide what needs protection and what not.

  - Jannis
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