X configuration paradigm, and a proposal

[Diego Calleja]

El Sun, 07 Nov 2004 17:23:43 -0800 xorg-owner at freedesktop.org escribió:

> You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has

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El Sun, 7 Nov 2004 17:03:44 -0300 Avi Alkalay <avibrazil at gmail.com> escribió:

> The proposal is to upgrade the way X handles configuration (human
> readable xorg.conf) to some hierarchy of configuration atoms
> represented by key-value pairs. Something similar to GConf, but not
> GConf because this one is not available when X needs to read its
> configurations.

IMHO making "human readable configuration" is wrong and misguided - users
should _never_ touch configuration files. Besides, your key/value scheme has
exactly the same problem than current xorg configuration file, you need to
know what key/values you need to change/add/delete. Also IMHO xorg.conf
itself already has a "key/value scheme":
Section "Screen" -> Subsection "Display" -> Depth 4, modes $FOO,
it's just in a single file. 

xorg currently supports autoconfiguration, you could tweak your scripts,
so if xorg startup fails you can relaunch xorg with the autoconfiguration
parameter, save the configuration file and relaunch X again. Of course
Xorg don't detects all the hardware, the configuration file could
(should?) be generated by a mix of hardware detectors + kernel (sysfs).

In fact, in my opinion this is how it should be done: no configuration
file needed, _always_ detect everything at runtime.

Also, I wouldn't be surprised if some distros had already solved this
problem ;)