per-session gsettings overrides

[Tim Lunn]

There have been several occasions now where Ubuntu GNOME has had to patch code, that could in theory instead be handled by per-session gsettings overrides. A recent example is the background plugin in gnome-settings-daemon (LP: #1219148), this should be loaded under unity, gnome-flashback sessions but not gnome-shell session. A per-session override would make this possible without any patches to the codebase.

As I understand it the overrides are processed by glib-compile-schemas so perhaps we would have to recompile schemas on each login to achieve this? Any thoughts on how we can achieve this?

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Compiling schemas on every login is a waste of both CPU time and also disk space. Perhaps instead of /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/gschemas.compiled glib could first look into /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/$SESSION/gschemas.compiled and if that doesn't exist, fall back to the standard path?

[Allison Karlitskaya (desrt)]

Worth noting that it's already possible to add new directories to the schema search path via GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.