Re: time for a flamewar, or ... what about grdb

[Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com>]

George wrote:

> So, the thing is, should grdb go into gnome-core?

I looked at the source a long time ago, so my comments might not be
accurate at this point.

> What is this marvell of modern technology?  Makes motif/athena apps have the
> same colors as your gtk theme.  That is, you netscape no longer looks like
> crap when around other gtk apps.

The problem is that grdb would make my Netscape look like crap. Currently
it looks like I want it to, because I have X resources in place. grdb
would put some arbitrary values which I don't want.

> Cons:
> * There are none, I'm trying to convince you it's a good idea, why should I
>   point out any bad sides.

The missing pieces in grdb:

  * X11R6.4 has ERC (Easy Resource Configuration) extension. It enables
    you to change X resources at run time, so you don't have to restart
    applications, because the changes take place immediately. grdb just
    doesn't use it.

    I don't like the way ERC is implemented much, because it was just a
    quick kludge. It should have been built on top of editres and the
    missing part of editres (retreiving values of X resources) should have
    been implemented. But even as it is, it's better than the method
    used by grdb (fork & exec xrdb, then restart the apps). I think
    ERC should be used if supported, otherwise the current behaviour is
    OK as a fallback. I was never able to find any documentation about
    ERC, but it's quite easy to find out how to use it from the X sources.

  * grdb checks for user defined X resources (which then override anything
    it calculates from the GTK theme) only in ~/.Xdefaults. This is the
    reason why grdb would make my Netscape look like a crap, because it
    wouldn't find anything there. It should look at all the usual places
    for this kind of things (and probably be linked with libXt, which
    would perform the search for X resources). For the moment I'll ignore
    applications started from the remote server.

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