Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 7 Oct 2009, at 23:00, David Chisnall wrote:

> On 7 Oct 2009, at 22:38, Matt Rice wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Stef Bidi <stefanbidi@gmail.com>  
> > wrote:
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > > 13.0) there's not way for me
> > > to set a default, "preferred" theme--which is what the GUI  
> > > toolkits above
> > > allow you to do--there is just no way for me to do that.  I know  
> > > it's been
> > > brought up a few times in the past, and if I remember correctly  
> > > it's because
> > > of the way NSUserDefaults is setup, so (again, in my opinion)  
> > > that's where
> > > the problem lies.
> >
> > I believe you are mistaken, NSUserDefaults handles global settings
> > fine, you just need to add the default to the NSGlobalDomain,
>
> Unless I have missed something, NSGlobalDomain is a per-user thing.

Yes.

> There is no sensible way of setting a default value for a user  
> default globally.

GlobalDefaults.plist does that.

>  Apps can do this via the standard APIs, but there is no way for  
> packagers to provide a default value for a default.

GlobalDefaults.plist does that.

> For example, we can put Camaelon and Nesedah in a package, but there  
> is no way to make it the default theme for any users who have not  
> selected a theme as part of the package installation.

GlobalDefaults.plist does that.

> This question has been asked on the list before and no one replied  
> with a way, so I assume it is still impossible.

Maybe nobody bothered to answer, or they did and you missed it.

> It would be nice to have a standard directory for plists which are  
> merged together to provide the default user default values.  I  
> looked at doing this a while ago, but it required implementing  
> whiteout in the per-user defaults (so you could delete a default  
> that exists in this directory).

The per-user defaults override the global ones ... what we don't have  
is a mechanism for having global defaults which can't be  
overridden .... but I'm not sure we want to do that (it seems to be  
against the spirit of free software).