

Contribute
There are several ways to contribute to the Sabayon project.
Testing, go here if you want to install sabayon and try it out.
Developing, get the code and try to fix errors and send patches to the maintainers.
Helping out on the mailing list and IRC for people having problems, letting them know where to go and what to do.
Contact
You can contact developers sending a mail to the Sabayon mailing list. You do not need to be subscribed.
We are also often available to chat on IRC.
Server: irc.gnome.org
Channel: #sabayon
This page details the format of the user configuration file, where to store and access them.
The user database
This file is located under /etc/desktop-profiles/users.xml (see PROFILESDIR in the config.py file to change the prefix), as the name makes clear it is an XML file and usually look like:
<profiles> <user name="titeuf" profile="developer"/> <user name="fab" profile="developer"/> <user name="bianca" profile="secretary"/> ... <default profile="default"/> </profiles>
It contains a list of named users, and their associated profile. The profile in that case are aliases, for example developer is a shortcut for developer.zip in the same directory.
The default profile will be applied for any login not listed explicitely in the set of users. At this point there is no support for grouping user definitions in the format, this may be added later if there is an unambiguous way to do it.
Centralized user databases and profiles
For large and automated deployement, maintaining copies of the user database and profiles on all machines does not really make sense. To avoid the problem, the profile values can be an URI - preferably using HTTP - to reference a remote resource like:
... <user name="titeuf" profile="http://server.corp.com/prof/developers.zip"/> <user name="fab" profile="http://server.corp.com/prof/developers.zip"/> ...
The profiles should then be maintained on a separate machine and copied over to the server when updated.
The user database can also be centralized, using the XInclude mechanism for XML. For example the following assume there is a developer list maintained separately on the server, and defining the profiles for them:
<profiles> <xi:include xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude" href="http://server.corp.com/user/devel.xml#xpointer(//user)"/> ... <default profile="default"/> </profiles>
This XInclude will just collect all user definitions in the developer list at http://server.corp.com/user/devel.xml and replace the include statement with that list, and process the XML as usual. The only difference is that the profile values are then assumed to be URI-References and for example if the devel.xml contains
... <user name="titeuf" profile="../prof/developers.zip"/> ...
then sabayon will fetch the profile relative to the location of devel.xml, that is it will lookup the profiles relative to the base of where the fragment was defined and use http://server.corp.com/prof/developers.zip. Also note that shortcut are not allowed there, the trailing .zip is needed.
The last point about the centralized support is that sabayon will use a cache located in the user home directory under .sabayon/profile_cache to keep a copy of the non-local files, this allows profile to function normally in disconnected operations or in case of server failures.
LDAP support
Sabayon also supports using LDAP to get profiles in a very flexible way. Further details here.