Suggestion for improving xinit 1.3.4

[Yaakov Selkowitz]

On 2015-01-05 05:46, Laurens Blankers wrote:
> As requested [1] a separate thread for suggesting improvements to xinit,
> in order to solve some of the issues people have been having since the
> release of 1.3.4-1 [2].
>
> 1. Handling of empty .startxwinrc
> Given the new behaviour of startxwin having an empty is never a correct
> configuration. It would be really nice if startxwin could check for a
> zero length .startxwinrc and in that case just start the X server
> without any programs, as it used to do in 1.3.2-1. This would solve a
> problem reported several times [3, 4] and also solve the problem of
> having an icon on the task bar for 'sleep inf' [5].

And what if it's not zero-length but still blank?

> 2. Adding a hint about 'sleep inf' to the FAQ
> Not everyone reads the release notes, most people, when running into
> problems will read the FAQ first. How about adding an entry similar to
> this one:
>
> Q: startxwin exits immediately on start-up without error
> A: ~/.startxwinrc must be executable and block or else X server will
> exist, adding a 'sleep inf' to the end of the file should help, also see [2]

Yes, something along these lines should be added to the FAQ soon.

> 3. Adding 'listen' option to the FAQ

See my response to your PuTTY thread.

> 4. Semantic versioning
> Signalling major changes in the version number makes it a lot easier to
> find the problem, at least for me. Semantic versioning [7] suggest does
> thing. Practically this would have mend calling the latest release
> 2.0.0-1 rather than 1.3.4-1. No additional effort required, but a clear
> signal to people to read the release notes.

xinit -- the startx and xinit parts -- is an upstream X.Org package, and 
they determine the package version.  The startxwin components are 
Cygwin-specific additions to the package, as they have been since we 
first released modular X11R7.4.  Therefore, changing the version in this 
way isn't a viable option here.

However, from personal experience, I disagree that a different version 
number would have made a bit of difference.  Either people will read the 
announcements -- and the subject of mine should have indicated that this 
wasn't a routing update -- or they won't.

--
Yaakov


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