[Mageia-dev] Deprecating startx

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Wolfgang Bornath at 07/03/12 10:13 did gyre and gimble:
> 2012/3/7 Guillaume Rousse <guillomovitch at gmail.com>:
>> Le 07/03/2012 10:26, Colin Guthrie a écrit :
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Unless someone comes along and does a reasonable amount of coding before
>>> mga2, I think we'll have to deprecate supporting startx (it can still be
>>> used in some circumstances, but audio and accelerated graphics will not
>>> be available).
>>>
>>> See this comment (and the link therein) for more info on the issue:
>>> https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4652#c9
>>
>> What is the operational translation of 'deprecating support of foo' ?
>> automatic answer "no support" to any user reporting issue with it ? removing
>> it from the distribution ?
>>
>> While I don't care about the first one, I do care about the second
>> interpretation. Given the very high fragility of the gnome environment
>> nowadays, using old-days tools to workaround those various issues is
>> frequently useful.
> 
> Different from Guillaume I do care about the impact for the user.
> There are many out there who are used to startx and also docs and
> howtos which use it. Therefore we will need an explanation for
> switching off startx.  An explanation to be used in forums, which is a
> bit more than just a link to a bug report. In other words: to be
> understood by non-techie users.

To answer Guillaume's question, I wasn't personally planning on removing
it fully. Just documenting that it is broken and that users should not
use this as a mechanism for starting X.

I would propose just putting in "echo 'startx is deprecated. Here is
why.....   Press any key to continue anyway.' >&2; read -n 1" in the
startx script such that users using it will be warned. Does this seem
sensible?

Col


-- 

Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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