[Bf-funboard] Saving default user prefs

[Roland Hess]

Despite the fact that the procedure to do a "true" user-pref while 
working is simply: Save, Ctrl-N, adjust pref, save pref, Ctrl-Shift-Open 
to reopen your project, which I'm sure Tony is aware of, I second this. 
The inclusion of a "Save User Prefs" button in the "new" user prefs 
window is seriously misleading. I understand that it's there as a 
convenience, but the gap between expected and actual behavior makes it a 
bad interface choice.

Not sure what the best way to tackle that is internally, as it makes 
much more sense to adopt the behavior Tony describes in addition to our 
current method. There are three use cases:
1. User wants to make a pref adjustment and have it (and only it) follow 
the application.
2. User wants to make a pref adjustment and have it (and only it) follow 
that particular .BLEND file.
3. User wants to adjust the default starting state of Blender, including 
UI configuration and datablocks.

Of those cases, number 1 is almost certainly the most frequent. It 
should be the default behavior, at least from the "save as default" 
button in the user prefs window. Seeing as we can easily dump properties 
out from Python these days, I'm wondering if it wouldn't be useful to 
have two layers of default material: the .b.blend file loads, after 
which Blender looks for a .b.py file in the same directory that contains 
a python dump of the user pref window properties. I think that would be 
the simplest solution, and it fits within the current paradigm of the 
way things are done internally.

Roland
> Hi,
>
> I think that this has been discussed before in the past, but with
> Blender 2.5 out I think it's timely. Please let me know if the
> functionality I'm describing is already in place, but it doesn't seem
> to be, which I think would be a missed opportunity.
>
> Basically, I would very much like to be able to set and save user
> preference values as defaults without having to save the whole current
> state of the blend as a default. The current way of doing things in
> Blender is valuable and worth hanging on to as an option, but there
> should also be another option for *only* saving values that were
> specifically set in User Prefs.
>
> There are plenty of use case examples for why this is needed, but one
> that comes up for me literally several times a week is when I am
> working with students and I want to set some preference on their
> installation (such as emulate numpad) while they are in the middle of
> a project. The current hassles involved in doing this mean that mostly
> I don't set the value as a default on students' machines, so I have to
> keep telling them to reset it over and over again. There are of course
> many other occasions when people want to change preferences while
> working on something.
>
> The new User Prefs separate window seems to suggest that this is how
> it should work, so it's a bit surprising to go into User Prefs, change
> values, and set them as defaults only to find that things totally
> unrelated to User Prefs have also been set as defaults.
>
> T
>
>
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> End of Bf-funboard Digest, Vol 62, Issue 2
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-- 
Roland Hess
IT Manager and Digital Prepress
Reed & Witting Company
Pittsburgh, PA
412-682-1000