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

[John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au>]

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On Tue, Nov 29, 2016 at 03:34:11PM +0100, Ludovic Court??s wrote:
     John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> 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.

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).

 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.

     

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