Re: Respecting standard X options (diatribe)

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2000 at 01:46:34PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> We've decided not to support the single-hyphen long options. So don't
> add -display or -geometry. 

This sounds very odd to me.  I would think it a very large benefit to
support -display.  I think that for the others, -- is fine because people
probably have to use --help to see them anyway.

I don't see a benefit in gratuitous incompatibility with the rest of X .

"-display" could surely be handled in gtk_init and gnome_init.

-geometry is a problem for multiple-windo X apps too, by the way.  Some
take it to be the first top-level window, others every window.
The solution for Xt apps is to use
    -xrm 'fileDialog*geometry: 300x4000'
or whatever, but gnome lacks that level of customisation.  Whether that's
good or bad is another question entirely :-)

But I think -display should be handled, if only for compatibility with
application launchers that supply the argument automatically.
Maybe those are not common; things like HummingBird's X Server does
that, as I recall.

Of course, one can always write a shell wrapper for each gnome program,
if necessary, that changes -display to --display.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
author, The Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley, August 2000
Co-author, The XML Specification Guide, Wiley, 1999