Re: X and Window Mangers

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

Branden Robinson wrote:
> Uh, I've never played with alternatives before.  Would someone care to
> flesh out this proposal?

Sure.. make all window managers that would previously register themselves in
/etc/X11/window-managers instead register themselves as an alternative
providing /usr/X11R6/bin/window-manager. This means that we have to assign
different priorities to each window manager, which they use when
registering (notice this requires some cooperation between maintainers of
window managers to set the priorities). update-alternatives makes 
/usr/X11R6/bin/window-manager be a symlink to whichever window manager has 
the highest priority and is currently installed. 

If an admin prefers some other window manager be default, there is a 
update-alternatives command they can use to increase its priority so it 
becomes the default. It's even possible to preserve that priority change
accross upgrades. If we want to get fancy, there can be a frontend to this.

Then you make /etc/X11/window-managers contain only
"/usr/X11R6/bin/window-manager" (or you get rid of the file and hard-code
that in the Xsession file).

This parallels how /usr/bin/editor and /usr/bin/pager currently work. Check
them out. 

It also means that window managers need not depend on xbase at all.

-- 
see shy jo


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