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From: mouse@SHAMASH.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU (der Mouse)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re:  Wish list for R5
Message-ID: <9008130225.AA21698@shamash.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Date: 13 Aug 90 02:25:51 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 61

David Lowe takes a stab at suggesting a cleanup mechanism for the
current mess of resource specifications.

> As someone who has just gone through the process of learning X as a
> user and programmer, I believe one of the areas of X that most needs
> cleaning up is the way that resources are handled.  I've taken a stab
> at suggesting a better mechanism below.

For the most part, his suggestions sound good to me.  However (now how
did you guess that was coming? :-), I have a couple of comments....

First is that

> In summary, the current "resource" system should be replaced by a set
> of programmer-specified configuration parameters.  A standard
> graphical interface could then be written to allow the user to edit
> them.

The current "resource" system *is* a set of programmer-specified
configuration parameters.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with the
current mechanism as an internal mechanism; the problems are all due to
the lack of a good user interface to it.

In fact, the current mechanism has a nice property that would be
difficult to achieve with a system based on each application having
some configurable parameters which are kept in a file somewhere, that
being that it is possible to specify something for all applications for
which it makes sense.  For example, my .Xdefaults has lines

	*Foreground: white
	*Background: black

Someone else on xpert (rws, I think it was) gave another example,
something like

	*shapeStyle: oval

I would find having to separately customize the same changes into each
application I want to use extremely irritating.  The current mechanism
automatically gives me white-on-black for applications which draw stuff
without causing errors from applications which don't.  (Yes, there are
such - xwd, for example.)

I would also offer a plea for the preservation of the current system
(or something like it) as the internal mechanism because I would rather
edit a file than use a customization tool that's someone else's idea of
"user-friendly" - and I'm sure I'm not the only one (though I daresay
we're probably a minority).

[on the problems with app-defaults files]
> In fact, most of the sample code distributed with X seems to have
> been written by people who understand these problems and they have
> avoided using application defaults files.

More likely, IMO, is that the code you're thinking of dates from before
there were app-defaults files.

					der Mouse

			old: mcgill-vision!mouse
			new: mouse@larry.mcrcim.mcgill.edu