Re: Fink and X11
Re: Fink and X11
- Subject: Re: Fink and X11
- From: Martin Costabel <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:08:15 +0100
Ralph Martin wrote:
On 25 Feb 2008, at 2:09:18PM, Martin Costabel wrote:
OTOH, when Fink installed the new xinitrc package, it asked you very
explicitly whether you wanted to let it replace the system xinitrc by
an augmented one that adds some additional hooks. Did you just reply
"yes" automatically?
No, I thought carefully, and that is precisely why I have brought up
this problem here. There seems to be no good answer to this question:
- yes risks breaking part of the OS - clearly a bad idea
- no presumably means that some fink installed stuff wont work
correctly (or else why would they be replacing this file?)
I can also only guess: The main interest of adding additional hooks
seems to be to have more possibilities of adding fonts to the X font
path, and this in a stable way that does not depend on the ever-changing
fontconfig system. I have not felt the need for this in recent versions
of Apple's X11, but Japanese users (which is where this idea is coming
from) may have other and more serious needs for additional fonts in X11.
I thus reluctantly said yes, as perhaps the worst of the two options
offered.
As my previous email surely should have told you, I would rather NOT
have to make such a choice with no good answer.
I understand your reluctance, and I am uneasy about this, too. Fink has,
in general, a rather strict policy of not touching anything outside its
own installation tree. The main question is who "owns" that script.
The X11 xinitrc script has, AFAICT, not changed in many years, except
for Apple's replacing the call to twm by quartz-wm. The 10.5.2 update
still has that old xinitrc script. It is only very recently that Jeremy
has put in a new version that, essentially, contains a hook to a
font-loader script, just as Aida's modified xinitrc does. The two
font-loaders are, of course, very different, and it would indeed be good
if there were some discussion about this idea that seems to have come up
simultaneously at different places.
In particular there seems to be a need for a non-system, but system-wide
startup script or configuration file, a kind of middle layer between the
system xinitrc and the user ~/.xinitrc, just as there is /Library in
between /System/Library and ~/Library.
--
Martin
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