== Remote applications and Gnome settings: an irritation

Here is a conundrum that I have recently run into, posed as a question:
when you run a Gnome application remotely through [[ssh-forwarded X
../sysadmin/ToolsRxexec]], where does it get its Gnome configuration
settings from?

In the old days of [[X resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_resources]], this sort of question had
a simple answer; custom settings were attached to the screen itself
(they got stuffed into an X property) and thus were accessible to all X
programs, regardless of where they were running. In the new ultra-modern
world of [[GConf http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/]] and friends, the
answer is far from obvious.

In theory, Gnome applications get their settings from a per-user [[GConf
daemon http://projects.gnome.org/gconf/]], which they talk to via
DBus. As usually implemented, DBus is strictly local to the local
machine, so the answer should be that they get their configuration
settings from whatever Gnome settings you have established on whatever
machine the application is running on. (I will not think too hard about
how the necessary user GConf daemon gets started; I find it better not
to think much about Gnome magic.)

In practice, this seems to work for some settings but not others.  In my
testing, Gnome's application specific settings work on a remote machine,
but the general desktop settings do not (even when they influence
application behavior). Specifically, I know that a custom setting for
the ((cursor_blink)) key in /desktop/gnome/interface is ignored when my
session isn't actually on the machine that I'm running _gnome-terminal_
on. Sadly, this is is [[kind of a problem BlinkingGnomeTerminal]] for
me.

(In theory this behavior could be justified on the grounds that my
session isn't on that machine, but it results in undesirable behavior
that I have no way to control. And yes, _gconftool_ on the remote
machine claims that the key is properly set and everything works if my
session actually is native to the remote machine (apart from the bit
where I am using a slow [[LTSP http://www.ltsp.org/]] instead of my nice
desktop machine).)