Running gsettings as root

[Josef Wolf]

On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 02:37:50PM +0200, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> On Mi, 2016-08-17 at 11:21 +0200, Josef Wolf wrote:
> > 
> > I want to do lots of configuration settings as root in the background
> > I know, I can do this with
> > 
> >   sudo -u $USER dbus-launch --exit-with-session gsettings set [ .... ]
> > 
> > This works fine while the user is NOT logged in.
> > 
> > But it won't work if the user IS logged in.
> 
> have a look at the dconf command (dconf-cli package), IIRC dbus will
> check if there is a gsettings-daemon running and block if there is one
> (to prevent concurrent access to the same key) ... 
> 
> dconf can modify the db directly without involving the daemon.

Are you sure about this? The dconf man page says:

  Note that dconf needs a D-Bus session bus connection to write changes
  to the dconf database.

And IF it can directly write: istn't there a risk to corrupt the database when
accessing it directly while it is opened by another process?

Or will dconf automatically use the existing connection when a user is logged
in and otherwise create a new one?

gsettings has the additional benefit that it will do type and consistency
checks.

-- 
Josef Wolf
jw at raven.inka.de