Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 19:55:03 +0100 From: Dejan Lesjak <dejan.lesjak@ijs.si> To: freebsd-x11@freebsd.org Cc: x11@freebsd.org Subject: Re: xdm rc scripts Message-ID: <200502191955.04070.dejan.lesjak@ijs.si> In-Reply-To: <200502182225.45734.josemi@freebsd.jazztel.es> References: <200502182225.45734.josemi@freebsd.jazztel.es>
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On Friday 18 of February 2005 22:25, Jose M Rodriguez wrote: > Hi, > I launch PRs ports/74000 and ports/74003 time ago, to make launch of xdm > from a rcNG script possible (Not mandatory). > > I think that this must be part of X11 clients ports, but if someone find > any issue with this, let me know. Hi, Some of my issues: In my opinion there is no need for a rc script to start xdm, since this is already taken care of by /etc/ttys which also starts gettys on other ttys - so all of gettys and xdm, which "[...] provides services similar to those provided by [...] getty [...]" are in one place. This putting of configuration of things which are similar seems to be exactly what you intended, or am I completely mistaken? Furthermore the PRs you submitted would require us to patch XFree86 and X.Org code which is not necessary, because that code is perfectly fine and has worked, works and probably will work for some time to come. We have in X11 ports quite a few of patches which are needed to split installation of X11 distribution into separate pieces to hopefully ease maintenance for users in case where only one component needs updating. These are the patches that will never be submitted to upstreams, since they are completely ports specific and both of X11 build fine without them. Your patch to programs/xdm/config/Imakefile would increase the burden of maintaining local patches for what, at least to me so far, doesn't seem like something that actually needs patching - xdm on FreeBSD will take the first virtual terminal available so hardcoding default doesn't seem to be the right way. Which brings me to another point... In your PR, you mention "race problems". Could you please explain what do you mean by this. If there is a problem that would be introduced with starting xdm through rc script, then that is another reason not to abandon the long time documented way of doing things, which works quite well. Note that this only goes for xdm. If there is any script eventually included in either X11 -clients, then that script cannot take responsibility of starting things which come from other ports such as gdm or kdm (BTW, you forgot wdm). Kdm and gdm have their own maintainer teams who know how to start their programs properly and intruding into their territory with this script seems neither appropriate nor wise (consider that the way in which wdm starts changes in one version - how intuitive would it be to expect people to upgrade xorg-clients to get wdm working, not to mention why would people who don't use wdm or any foodm for that matter need to upgrade their ports). In short: stuffing startup of all display managers into one script would seem a bad idea. So I haven't been convinced so far that making rc script for purpose of starting a kind of getty would be either needed or something that would simplify things. I don't believe that rc.conf is the only file users edit after their FreeBSD installation. I also don't believe that it would be good if things were changed so that rc.conf would be the only file users would need to edit. There was mentioned a question of policy vs. features among the thread discussing this... I don't believe a policy is dictated by having an example of starting xdm in /etc/ttys file - users can still make their own rc script if they want and configure it as it fits their purpose, be it "old style" rc script or rcNG one. Dejan
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