GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 344272
Ability to add groups to apply the profile to
Last modified: 2009-12-16 04:54:44 UTC
It would be handy to have the ability to apply the profiles created to users and groups instead of just users. For instance, if you have a network of more than 50 users it makes much more sense to "group" these users together and apply the profile to the group. I don't know if this is technically possible or not, but it would make administration of larger networks much, much easier.
How about having a line like: <group name="developers" profile="Developer Desktop"/> in users.xml ? Or maybe even have a group.xml file ?? In this case, there might be a problem if there's a user, say suresh belonging to the group developers, and apart from the entry above, there's also an entry which says: <user name="suresh" profile="Admin Desktop"/> In such a situation, a possible solution is to make sabayon-apply require a flag (say --users=yes) which would override the group settings and apply the settings for Admin Desktop to suresh's $HOME. However, even then, a single user may belong to more than one group - causing trouble later on. Comments/suggestions on this would be very helpful.
A line in users.xml can be added as below, <group name="developers" profile="Developer Desktop"/> And also to be more general, we can have profiles.xml or something similar so that it removes the name dependency - users.xml / groups.xml and have a tag "type" which would change the above line as, <name="developers" type=group profile="Developer Desktop"/> <name="chaks" type=user profile="My Profile"/> If we explore, Microsoft Windows Group Policy Management, the grouping allows the Users to be in more than one group, but if we are going to apply Policies, we see that the User is in a single group and that group does not conflict with others.For example, we put every developers in Developers Group only and Finanace to Finance Group only. There is no need for any of the Developer to be in Finanace Group and vice versa. Sabayon, to work with Groups, needs to have few constraints and if we take the Enterpise Market as our target, I think it would be simple. Comments/Suggestions are welcome.
Just for reference - I came up with a small hack which lets you apply a given profile to the members of a given group - it's at http://mail.gnome.org/archives/sabayon-list/2007-January/msg00020.html
Sayamindu, Your significant hack doesn't work for primary groups. :(
OK, as of sabayon 2.29.2, group apply is added to sabayon.
And closing as fixed.