[Xcb] Library for access to the resource manager

[Uli Schlachter]

Am 11.01.2016 um 10:52 schrieb Ingo Bürk:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I noticed that there currently seems to be nothing within the area of
> XCB that offers access to the resource manager and its contents. In [1],
> Michael Stapelberg also noted that some tools such as cairo-xcb and
> xcb-util-cursor currently parse the RESOURCE_MANAGER property of the
> root window by hand, which is duplicated work, rather ugly and AFAICT
> won't work if the configuration uses wildcards (as allowed by the spec).
> 
> We therefore had the idea of writing a library ("xcb-util-xrm") to allow
> access to the resource manager contents without having to use Xlib's
> Xrm* (X11/Xresources.h). Is this something worth doing – or is there
> even already something that I haven't been able to find?
> 
> I'd love to get this started, but would also appreciate help / guidance
> in terms of setting up the project or anything worthy knowing before
> doing so. For the start, I'd like to focus on a (spec conforming) way to
> query resources from the database (not anything to modify them). I'd
> also appreciate discussions about the API for this, but this is
> something for after the work on this started.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/2130

Hi,

I see you started a GitHub repo for your work [1], nice. Thanks for working on
this and I think this is a really good idea to have. I'll definitely make
cairo-xcb and awesome use this when it's finished.

However, this makes me wonder about duplicate work... Awesome uses cairo-xcb so
your library would be initialized twice and will parse the RESOURCE_MANAGER
property twice. On the other hand, this should be quick and nothing to really
worry about.

If you want, I'd suggest to host the resulting library on freedesktop.org,
together with the other xcb-util libraries. Since I'm not sure about the
procedure for this, you should talk to Michael Stapelberg who went through the
same thing for his util-cursor.

Also, if no one complains about this idea, then due to review by crickets it's
settled that the XCB project participants agree to this plan. :-)

Thanks & Cheers,
Uli

[1]: https://github.com/Airblader/xcb-util-xrm

P.S.: And say hi to Christian from me. :-)
-- 
“Some people are worth melting for.” - Olaf