[Mageia-dev] Deprecating startx

Wed Mar 7 15:09:33 CET 2012

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).
+
+-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
+Free (Creative Commons) Music Downloads, Reviews and more - http://jamendo.com/
+
+I hope that you agree with me that 99.9218485921% of the users wouldn’t bother
+themselves with recompilation (or any other manual step for that matter) to
+make their games run 1.27127529900685765% faster ;-) — Nadav Har’El
+
+Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
+