XfceKiosk in 4.6

[Erik Harrison]

On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 8:29 PM, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I was thinking about XfceKiosk a bit -- do we want to deprecate it as of
> 4.6?  On one hand, we have xfconf property locking now, but there might
> still be some cases where XfceKiosk could be useful, like in panel
> plugins, for example, that still use XfceRc files for settings.
>
> Of course, even those could be made to use xfconf in some way, but the
> kiosk system works not just on settings, but on "actions" as well.  For
> example, allowing the user to edit a launcher, there might be a
> CustomizeLauncher capability in XfceKiosk.  The only useful way to
> duplicate that in xfconf would be to add some property, say
> /kiosk/allow-customize-launcher, set it to... well, anything... and then
> set up the locking so the launcher could check property locking on it to
> decide if it's allowed to override it.  Kinda a kludge.
>
> Any thoughts on this in general?  I'd like to avoid having two separate
> lockdown frameworks.  Either way, I think I'd vote to deprecate in 4.6,
> and figure out a way to integrate it more usefully in xfconf.

I haven't touched kiosk mode in a long while, but I think we can all
agree it needs an internal and external overhaul I have some rough
ideas, but that's another email. That said I'm uncomfortable
deprecating anything without someone stepping up to say "I'll overhaul
the thing for next release". If we deprecate, less likely various app
and plugin authors will add kiosk support, which is fine unless we
don't actually replace the kiosk system, 4.8 comes out, and we're
stuck with our dicks in our hands (metaphorically).

On the gripping hand I'm willing to believe that there are people with
apps in the Xfce repository who haven't heard of kiosk mode, so
perhaps our fly has been effectively unzipped for a while now.

>
>        -brian
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-- 
Erik
"It's true, Alice Cooper is a hippie, but he's the bad kind of hippie.
He's the kind of hippie that breaks into people's offices, beats them
up, and shoots them in the head. Why? To steal their antique chairs."