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Re: [XBoard-devel] git issues


From: Michel Van den Bergh
Subject: Re: [XBoard-devel] git issues
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:39:24 +0100
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.23 (X11/20090817)

h.g. muller wrote:

I think it should be the following order

/etc/xboard/xboard.conf
~/.xboard/xboard.conf

This is what is common on Linux. There should be a command line argument
for specifying an alternative configuration file (or perhaps config directory).

Michel

I think for linux the user file should go into

~/.config/xboard/xboard.conf

That's where newer programs on my computer put there config files...
other programs use something like ~/.xboardrc

I remember reading somewhere that .conf should be the ending for config
files, but I can't find a reference for that at the moment.

ARUN

Hmm, no agreement there... In fact the existing code allows an "-ini FILENAME" option in a settings file; encountering such an option makes XBoard first process the mentioned file as settings file, before finishing the processing of the original settings file. In addition the given FILENAME is remembered, and used whenever the settings are saved later. So if we use that option as the final option occurring in the system-wide settings file, the default place for the user settings need not be hard-coded, but becomes configurable itself. The compiled-in defaults would only have to decide on the standard place for the system-wide settings (e.g. /etc/xboard/xboard.conf), and only when the user would append as a last line to that file "-ini ./xboard.ini" he would read (and overrule) and save settings from an ini file in the current directory. Users that do not like that could add the line "-ini ~/xboard.ini" or "-ini ~/.config/xboard/xboard.conf" or "-ini ~/.xboard/xboard.conf" in stead, depending on their preference. The maintainer creating the binary package could decide which configuration fits the conventions of his distribution best,
and include a system-wide settings file with the appropriate definition.

If no secondary settings file was defined in the primary one, saving the settings
would occur in the primary one.



This sounds sensible except that many people will install xboard with the standard mantra

./configure
make
make install

and if the system wide config file does not contain a suitable ini line users would end up
with an xboard that does not remember settings (as is the current situation)

I looked in the various Linux standard documents (LSB LFH) but I could not find a specification for what the the user specific configuration file should be. Traditionally it would indeed have been ~/.xboardrc then it changed to ~/.xboard/xboard.conf and now it seems to be that many application use ~/.config/xboard/xboard.conf.

I guess it does not really matter what the user specific configuration file is except I think it should definitely not be ./xboard.conf. That would mean that the xboard configuration would depend on the current directory which would lead to all kinds of surprizes (e.g. engines would use 64M hash
in one directory and 128M hash in another directory).










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