[Mageia-dev] Deprecating startx

Wed Mar 7 12:15:29 CET 2012

'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
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+