display manager integration

Benedikt Meurer benny at xfce.org
Thu Jan 26 23:40:15 CET 2006


Brian J. Tarricone wrote:
>>>>Not sure, but it seems like display managers are standardising on
>>>>/usr/share/xsessions and .desktop files for session data.  Should we be
>>>>installing xfce.desktop unconditionally into /usr/share/xsessions now?
>>>
>>>/usr/share/xsessions doesn't seem to be a good idea. I'd suggest to 
>>>install to $(datadir)/xsessions instead.
> 
> How is that really useful?  If I install to /opt/xfce4, I seriously
> doubt the display manager is going to look there.  Unless they're
> obeying XDG_DATA_DIRS, which instinct tells me they're not.

Well, then you'll have to copy the file to /usr/share/xsessions. That's 
the usual procedure. Installing random stuff to /usr is certainly not a 
sane idea, I don't want any application to install stuff there, esp. if 
I specify --prefix=/some/where/else. Even worse, no login manager on my 
system would look into /usr/share/xsessions, this seems to vary among 
systems, e.g. /usr/share/xsessions, /usr/X11R6/share/xsessions, 
/opt/gnome/share/xsessions and /usr/pkg/share/xsessions seem to be the 
most common locations today.

For example the installer tries to auto-detect the xsessions directory 
and install the xfce4.desktop file to it. But if you add auto-detection 
to configure, make it optional and disabled by default to avoid 
unexpected results (i.e. installing stuff outside $prefix and thereby 
probably overriding existing xfce4.desktop files or whatever is not very 
user-friendly/packager-friendly for an autoconf-based software package).

> 	-brian

Benedikt
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