Re: [PATCH 1/4] gnu: Add XFILESEARCH path to profiles' environment.

[Ludovic Courtès]

John Darrington <address@hidden> skribis:

> On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 03:34:11PM +0100, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
>      John Darrington <address@hidden> skribis:
>
>      > We can cut down on the size of this string iff we can somehow
>      > guarantee that no package ever ships a file in any of those locations.
>      >
>      > Some "solutions" (in my order of preference) are:
>      >
>      > * The size of the above list can be halved, by dropping either the
>      > .../lib/... or the .../share/... items - we just have to then make
>      > sure that no package ships resource files in the one we drop.  
> Historically,
>      > resource files were always in .../lib (as still are all official
>      > sources from x.org) but recently third party packages have started
>      > putting them in .../share.
>      >
>      > * I *think* we could also get away with further reducing the set to 
>      >     "$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/X11/%T/%N%S:
>      >     /run/current-system/profile/lib/X11/%T/%N%S"
>      > because, all the Xt dependent packages I've seen so far, put their
>      > resource files there.  However, we cannot know what might get added
>      > in the future.
>      
>      Right, if we do both, that???s already much better.
>      
>      > * Hack the hard coded defaults in the libXt source to use the profile
>      > settings instead of /usr
>      
>      Maybe we should just do that, no?  It???d be a local change, it would
>      achieve the same effect, and it would provide a good default.
>      
>      WDYT?
>
> It sounds unreliable to me.  What would we set it to?
> $GUIX_PROFILE/...  $HOME/.guix-profile/... /run/current-system/profile/...
> There's no guarantee that the current profile is any of those.

Maybe, but that would have the same effect as setting the environment
variable to that value, wouldn’t it?

> Something similar to the first solution seems prefereable to me.  Maybe:
>
>  Set XFILESEARCHPATH to 
> "$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/X11/%T/%N%S:/run/current-system/profile/lib/X11/%T/%N%S"
>   (we can substitute "share" for "lib" if we want to keep the FHS people 
> happy).

How did you manage to shorten it that much?  It’s much less intimidating
now.  :-)

>  Then we audit all users of libxt to make sure they put their resource files 
> in lib/X11/app-defaults.
>  Most packages have a --with-app-defaults configure option (which currently 
> we are in many cases
>  either not using or misusing).
>
>  We could also consider adding a build stage to make sure that packages which 
> depend on libXt put
>  their resource files in the "right" place.

Sounds reasonable.

Ludo’.