[13628] in Athena Bugs
Re: decmips 7.7L: Xdefaults
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (cfields@MIT.EDU)
Mon Jul 3 02:26:09 1995
From: cfields@MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 3 Jul 1995 02:25:13 -0400
To: jhawk@MIT.EDU
Cc: dcns-dev-np@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
>What were you trying to do?
> Login without customizations (from Xlogin)
>
>What's wrong:
> My .Xdefaults file was xrdb -loaded (or -merged or something).
I believe "or something" is what happened here.
>What should have happened:
> That should not have happened. Firstly because Athena does
> not support the .Xdefaults file (instead uses the .Xresources
> file), and secondly because the only place in my dotfiles
> that my .Xdefaults file is referenced is my .xsession.
Actually, it should have happened. Athena has nothing to do with
supporting .Xdefaults or not. .Xdefaults was the predecessor to
.Xresources, where every application opened the file directly and
grabbed the stuff out of it (implicitly via an Xlib call). Someone
decided it would be more clever to store all the information in the
server directly and have everyone get it from there, and so
.Xresources was born. However, .Xdefaults remained for backwards
compatibility... If there are no resources loaded for the display,
then the Xlib code will fall back and read the .Xdefaults file. I
believe this is documented in the Xlib manual.
>Please describe any relevant documentation references:
> Without customizations means without customizations.
> This bug also ocurrs on the SGIs, and probably other
> Athena platforms, but I've not checked.
Well, sort of. There are several kinds of customizations you can't get
rid of short of nuking the user's home directory, and this turns out
to be one of them. I suggest you rename your .Xdefaults file if you
don't want to use a filename that has hard-coded behavior in Xlib.
Sorry not to have answered your report sooner.
Craig
