GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 121578
Hardwired paths in config files cause problems
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
Description of Problem: (relevant to gnome-2.2.1, from a Gentoo distribution, and probably all other versions..) When gnome is first run, the homedir config files are written hard-wired to the current environment variables. If the user has the same home directory on different computers that have it mounted on different paths or that give the user a different name (but not uid), this makes gnome have such failures as no file-manager access to the home directory. All these username and path dependent settings should be read afresh on login. Also, as many stored paths (e.g. a list of recent files) as possible should be stored with any initial home-directory path replaced by ~/ . Q How often does this happen? A always, in the situation described
At the moment this is a bug in the apps storing those settings. There's an open bug to add a convenience get/set_filename function to gconf to allow apps to get this right more easily. But for now it has to be fixed in the specific apps so you'd file a bug against them. I'm not going to bother to find the "add get/set_filename" feature request to mark this as a dup, but you may want to get on the cc list for that bug if you're interested.