How about a user-driven (KDE-) preferences package repository?

[Daniel Arnold]

Hi,

I -as a long-time KDE user- highly customize the GUI of my own KDE 
installation everytime I install my favourite Linux distribution (currently 
Kubuntu of course ;-) as I honestly can't remember a Linux distribution that 
had default preferences I liked (but thanks to the power of KDE this never 
was a big problem for me).

However I am aware that creating default preferences that make everybody happy 
is a very hard if not impossible task. As well how can a package manager read 
a users mind if the user doesn't tell him which setting (s)he prefers? On the 
other hand how can a large group of users tell package maintainers which 
preferences are choosen by a large majority of them?

Bug tracking systems like Bugzilla are not suited for collecting and 
evaluating such a kind of collaborative feedback (beside the usability 
nightmare). Ok there is the Ubuntu hardware database, which gives the user 
and the mainatiner an easy tool for collecting and evaluating actually used 
hardware and hardware issues. As well there is the favourite software 
feedback option in Adept but again this does not cover user preferences.

So how about a repository of packages that contain preferences choosen by 
users? For example my preference would be in a package 
called "kde-settings-daniel" or something like that. Everyone could then 
browse the repository and just install other people settings, modifying them 
and re-uploading them under their name. In the end you have a lot of 
different user preference profiles you could analyse statistically and I am 
sure in the course of improving each other preferences there will be some 
favourite settings created by a dozen of people (or something in that order 
of magnitude).

Of course there will be need for some caution as you can easily reveal some 
private data to others if you don't take care but I am sure this can be 
solved by some assisting software and an automated serverside double check at 
upload.

What do you think about it?

Cheers, Arnomane
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