Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!CS.CMU.EDU!rpd From: rpd@CS.CMU.EDU (Richard Draves) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x Subject: Re: Moving compiled X to another partition Message-ID: Date: 15 Apr 88 20:30:49 GMT References: <19651@sci.UUCP> Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 22 Wow, it must be telepathy or something. Just last night I was thinking, "Boy wouldn't it be convenient if there was some kind of environment variable that dynamically changed DESTDIR in everything." This would work like the ANDREWDIR environment variable should work in the Andrew Toolkit. I build & run X11 in Vice, but not everyone here in CS yet trusts Vice (NIH, even though the ITC is 100 yards away), so some people want to copy the tree to their local file system and run it out of a different directory. When they do this now it looks like it works, but they aren't actually freed of their dependency on Vice because the server, for example, is still going to the Vice directory for fonts. Of course, they can manually overcome dependencies one by one, but it is a pain and not everything is configurable. One generalization that I think I would like is, instead of specifying a single directory, to specify a path (so call the variable XROOTPATH or something). This would be handy for us because we want to separate official MIT release stuff and random contributed/hacked code, fonts, etc. People who want to stick with official release software would just have the one directory in their path, and more adventurous types could add directories to the front of the path. Then the server would initialize its font path from the list, search for the rgb database down the path, etc, etc. Rich