[Qgis-developer] Common QGIS Plugin configuration accross multiple Linux users

[Zoltan Szecsei]

On 2014/03/09 21:27, Richard Duivenvoorde wrote:
>> ~/.qgis2
>> and
>> ~/.config/QGIS
>>
>> You could e.g. rsync the user plugin dirs from a central one, or put
>> them in an nfs mount (read only might have issues as plugins try to
>> write .pyc files or even write data to the plugin dir).
>>
>> The ~/.config/QGIS/QGIS2.conf is a standard ini style config file so you
>> should be able to pick through it and awk/sed/bash your way to nirvana :-)
> I'm actually thinking about to make this OS independent, by creating a
> 'save QSettings' as file option. Then with a command line option you
> would be able to (just before reading the QSettings) actually read/write
> this settings file back into user settings. Thereby making it possible
> to for example transfer a certain setup across a class room (as long as
> the plugins are available in .qgis2 off cours).
>
> Would this work? Or do I miss something?
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard Duivenvoorde
>
>
>
Hi Richard/Tim/All,
One of the biggest problems I have with my data capture projects is 
uniformity of capture environment for my project staff.
You have just quoted a school scenario, but map production has that too.

I would really like to see a system wide (maybe network wide for both 
Windows & Linux users) config file that looks after all the icon 
placements and plugins installed and activated.

It could perhaps work like /etc/profile in linux - where that is loaded 
first, then ~/.profile if it exists, modifies the systemwide settings 
for that specific user.

To be honest, if that was extended to a "master" qgisprofile file on a 
specific server that would be even more useful - I often use multi-seat 
linux PCs networked together, for larger data capture projects.

So, possible implementation could be:

  * At install time, the user is asked if this is a
    "qgis-profile-server" PC, or to supply the qgis-profile-server PC
    name if there already is such a server on the network.
  * If such qgis-profile-server exists then the install procedure could
    get profile and plugin details from that PC, and copy over the
    config files and plugin binaries.
  * If the person installing qgis ignores the "profile-server"
    questions, then an autonomous installtion of qgis could take place,
    even if there was a qgis-profile-server on the network.
    (This would allow test installations and non-production
    installations to co-exist with a production environment)
  * It would be great if in the setup of the qgis-profile-server PC, a
    flag could be set that disallowed a (specific list or all) PC to
    change the icon placements or fiddle with any config or plugin. ie:
    Such PCs would always be dependent on the setup dictated by the
    profile-server.

This could also be made dynamic in that if the qgis-profile-server was 
updated or changed, it could set a flag. Whenever QGIS is started on a 
PC belonging to a profile-server group, it could first check with the 
server to see if changes need to be made, and if so, update the local 
copy of the profile. This way one could make changes to the master copy 
of QGIS and by restarting all the QGIS users on the network, propagate 
the changes to them immediately. (This is preferable to always obtaining 
your profiles across the network from a server.)

I haven't thought this through in "algorythm fashion", but that's the 
gist of what facilities and mechanisms would be really nice in a 
production environment.

HTH,
Zoltan



-- 

===========================================
Zoltan Szecsei PrGISc [PGP0031]
Geograph (Pty) Ltd.
GIS and Photogrammetric Service

P.O. Box 7, Muizenberg 7950, South Africa.

Mobile: +27-83-6004028
Fax:    +27-86-6115323     www.geograph.co.za
===========================================

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