Re: app-defaults installation

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Tuesday 09 March 2010 13:40:01 Allin Cottrell wrote:

> Yes, that fixes it. But there's still something a little odd here.
> After full updating (CVS, prepare and configure) I have
> 
> (a) in src/Makefile:
> # Location of X11 app defaults
> XAPPLRESDIR = /etc/X11/app-defaults/
> 
> (b) in share/Makefile:
> appdefaultdir = $(pkgdatadir)/$(VERSION_MAJOR)/app-defaults
> ...
> X11_APPDEFAULTS_DIR = /etc/X11/app-defaults/
> 
> "make install" in share uses the pkgdatadir path, not the one
> found for X11_APPDEFAULTS_DIR, although it's the latter that gets
> compiled into the program.


Yeah, I think it's odd also. 
But that was the best compromise I could come up with for the
conflicting complaints about installation.

It makes sense that we have to put it _somewhere_ during installation,
but the only place we can guarantee write access to is our own installation
path.  Hence the $(pkgdatadir)

But the X-server is not going to be running from there, so I don't think
it is correct for the gnuplot to use that as the default place to look
for an X configuration file.
/etc/X11/app-defaults is a standard location, although not universal.

Another thing to keep in mind is that for all these years, most
people didn't know about or pay any attention to configuring the
app-defaults file at all.  So it's not likely that many people will
notice the difference, especially if they install a packaged version
from a linux distro that has moved the file somewhere else :-)

More to the point, we should maybe add instructions on how to modify
this file to match personal preferences and place the modified version
in ~/.Xdefault or ~/.Xresources or whatever the local convention is.
The problem here is that the old, standard, instructions for X11R4
and direct successors don't seem to apply to current xorg installations.
So I don't even know what instructions to give :-(