Building Safety Into Our Work

[Paul Hoell]

Ok, i'm just gonna throw in some thoughts, which are tumbling around my head
right now, many have been posted already, i'm just piecing together my
vision.

I'd like this tool to automatically backup every session, so i don't have to
think about it before i make a possibly dangerous change. Just back up the
configuration when i save it and give me a CLI option to
--revert-last-change.
Taking this further, i think we should implement bazaar versioning for
dconf, the overhead shouldn't be prohibiting and the longterm benefit could
be substantial. Down the road it could also mean, we can extract a set of
config changes as a "patch" to share and implement on another machine.
Syncing the whole configuration via UbuntuOne and/or Launchpad. So the next
time i setup my system, i only log in to UOne and my master branch of
configs just gets pulled and installed.
I know this might sound like a lot, but i think this would be a great
feature if you want to use it, and if not, one wouldn't even notice it's
there, and only profit from a rock-solid auto-backup of the configuration.

Someone else posted the idea of making custom *-desktop metapackages. I
think implementing my proposal in the right way would leverage the need for
it. Because a branch of settings could basicly achieve the same thing,
especially if we extend the supported confgurations by repositories and
package list.

Thoughts?
Paul
<-


2011/5/21 Miguel Branco <mig.jcb at gmail.com>

>
> Hello all, great ideas here!
>
> Regarding the safety issues:
>
> I agree with the ideas posted so far, at least a warning at program startup
> advising caution and a way to rollback setting changes.
> I also agree that there should be a "rollback last changes", "rollback to
> <date>" and "rollback to defaults".
>
> I think the program should run as a GUI (as the mockup proposed) or a CLI
> program, in the case you "accidentally" bork your X.
> We could have some parameter like "-GUI" that went in the .desktop file,
> and then when you run it without "-GUI" it behaves as every CLI program,
> reminding you of the available options such as "-restoredefaults" and
> "-restoredate" etc
>
> Leveraging those features, I think this one should come in handy:
>
> Use the program to run your settings script, instead of configuring every
> setting by hand.
> You don't have to know how each setting is implemented by each plugin, you
> just export or manually write the list of settings and selected option and
> then let the program apply them using the plugins.
>
>
>
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