Re: Configuration

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 05:56:22PM -0800, Jim Gettys hp com wrote:
> Anything involving files is a non-starter.
>

Do you want to persist configuration in the magic bottle of pixie
dust? ;-)

X resources involve files too - ~/.Xdefaults, etc.
 
> Many X servers have no file storage associated with them (think X terminal).

But the user still has files, or they would not be able to store any
data. Or run any executables. And then I wonder what they are going to
do on their terminal.

Propagating configuration to the X display (for configuration that
should be per-display or per-screen, rather than per-user or per-app)
is one problem. That involves making the info available to all apps
connected to the display.

Actually storing (and persistently modifying) the configuration is a
totally different, though related, issue.

You have to address both at once.

You guys are doing the equivalent of saying my word processor document
should be in an X property. If I want the word processor document
available to everything on the display, yes I have to run it through
the clipboard or something. But my word processor document also has to
be saved, in a file. It doesn't *only* live on the display.

Talking about files vs. X properties is just pointless, you have to
get into specifics of when a piece of data lives where and how the X
server copy relates to the persistent copy.

But in any case, I did not mean to bring up the design of a complete
configuration system - that's exactly why I say a shared config system
is blue sky for the moment. I believe we need a shared IPC system
before we think about that. For the moment, what we need is some
underengineered hack of an answer to a relatively simple problem of
generically getting and setting some WM preferences.

As I said, my initial underengineered answer is to write a vtable for
each WM-desktop pair.

Havoc