PROPSAL: making xaw-wrappers not divert

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Xaw-wrappers serves a useful purpose, but it accomplishes it in a convoluted
fashion, by using dpkg-divert. This has led to lots of bugs, some of them
quite complex, over the past few years. It is possible to do away with the
need for xaw-wrappers to divert other packages' files. But I can't do this
without the help and cooperation of the people whose packages are affected
by xaw-wrappers. I've cc'd everyone.

First, an overview of how it works now. Xaw library packages that break some
programs use xaw-wrappers to divert those programs, and replace them with a
link to xaw-wrappers' wrapper script, which when run, twiddles the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH appropriatly and runs the diverted program. Also, some
packages (axe, freeciv, v-bin, xrn, xfig, xkeycaps, xxgbd) register file in
them with xaw-wrappers. The programs that the xaw libraries forcibly
register with xaw-wrappers are these:

xcolorsel
xconsole
xdvi.bin
oxdvi.bin

What I propose to do is change xaw-wrappers so it no longer diverts files.
If a file needs to be wrapped with xaw-wrappers, the package that it is in
will be responsible for moving the file to "filename.real", and making
"filename" be a symlink to /usr/lib/xaw-wrappers/wrapper, and placing an
xaw-wrappers control file in /usr/lib/xaw-wrappers/conf/. 

The package will also have to depend on xaw-wrappers. (I'm sure that will be
the controversial bit, if anything. :-)

That means that the packages containing the programs listed above will need
to be changed. If those of you I've cc'd this to are ameanable to this idea,
I'd like to get started on doing this. Please reply and let me know what you
think.

-- 
see shy jo