Re: [dwm] xprop patch

On Tue, Dec 09, 2008 at 07:44:21PM +0000, Anselm R Garbe wrote:
> 2008/12/9 Benoit T <benoit.triquet_AT_gmail.com>:
> > conversely, when hacking on dwm itself, i like being able to restart dwm
> > without restarting my x session, yet i want the session to exit when dwm
> > exits, ie. "dwm & xterm" in .xsession is not what i want.
>
> If you consider that Neale's patch makes it upstream, what do you think about:
>
> while true
> do
> dwm
> done
>
> in .xinitrc to restart dwm?

One of my requirements above was that quitting dwm should quit the X
session. Here you would have to kill .xsession. This can certainly be
done by killing dwm's parent in quit() but then the behavior when dwm is
launched from an xterm would be counter-intuitive!

Also, I initially had the requirement of being able to exec dwm at the
end of .xsession (and have a restart function). But you don't do that
with dwm reading from stdin, so no way to save one shell process.

With Neale's patch I can finally fulfill that requirement :)

One might point out that we still want one shell process for the status
script, and that shell could be the one interpreting .xsession and thus
we do not need exec'ing dwm in the first place.

I know of 2 reasons why we still want a separate process for the status
script:
- I can't think of a way to update the status script if it is sourced by
.xsession rather than forked.
- the status script might break (after all I am hacking it :) and if
sourced by .xsession could prevent the entire X session from starting up.

Speaking of a separate process, people should probably check the status
from xsetroot and exit when the X connection closes, to make it more
robust in case they detach the status script from the parent X process.

cheers

-- 
Benoit Triquet <benoit.triquet at gmail.com>
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