[Mageia-dev] Deprecating startx

[Shlomi Fish]

Hello Colin,

On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:15:29 +0000
Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:

> '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?

Having to press this every time will drive me nuts. If you are going to do it,
please also use an optional environment variable to trigger it off.

In any case, as an active user of startx, I do not appreciate the fact that
it will get deprecated. I don't like to start X automatically on startup
because that causes problem if there is problem with the X environment in
general, or with the graphics' driver etc. I tried starting up kdm from the
command line but could only start it as root, and it returned to the login
screen after I exited X (which is expected, but undesirable), and could only
be killed by root.

Luckily for me (and for Mageia) I am a programmer and can write the required
code to make startx play nice with the rest of systemd again. I'll read the URL
of the bug and see what is needed and hopefully with some guidance from the
people on Freenode, will make it work. If anyone wants to help, I'm "rindolf"
there and I'm also reachable by other forms of IM and by other means:

http://www.shlomifish.org/me/contact-me/

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish (who is frustrated at the amount of problems the transition
	to systemd has caused).

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