who's setting a wild-card'ed background color resource.

[George Hartzell]

Joe Marcus Clarke writes:
 > On Tue, 2003-10-21 at 18:48, George Hartzell wrote:
 > > George Hartzell writes:
 > >  > 
 > >  > I just got done updating ports on my 4.8 (4.8-RELEASE-p7) laptop,
 > >  > using the current ports tree (as of a couple of days ago).
 > >  > 
 > >  > [...]
 > >  > 
 > >  > The problem is: my custom background colors have disappeared.
 > >  > 
 > >  > [...]
 > >  > 
 > >  > I think what's killing me is this resource:
 > >  > 
 > >  >   *background:    #dcdad5
 > >  > 
 > >  > [...]
 > >  > 
 > >  > I can't figure out where it's getting set.  Is is part of one of the
 > >  > myriad themes that the various gnome things use?
 > >  > 
 > >  > Pointers/suggestions would be appreciated.
 > > 
 > > [...]
 > > 
 > > It seems that it's some portion of the
 > > gnome-control-center/theme-manager/gnome-settings-daemon that's
 > > "helping" me out with this.
 > > 
 > > There are a bunch of relevant files in
 > > /usr/X11R6/share/gnome/control-center-2.0/xrdb, which are being used
 > > as templates.
 > > 
 > > So, now the question is, how to control this behaviour. 
 > > [...]
 >
 > I don't see anywhere in gconf that this can be controlled.  You might be
 > able to trick gnome-settings-daemon by creating bogus .ad files in
 > ~/.gnome2/xrdb.

Well, it looks like it's not even a matter of *tricking*
gnome-settings-daemon, it's set up to let you use your settings in
favor of the system defaults by putting an identically named file in
your .gnome2/xrdb.

*Except* for General.ad, which is what's splatting the wild-card
resource.  gnome-settings-xrdb.c:scan_for_files() does this:

	/* Add the initial file */
	list = g_slist_prepend (list, g_strdup (GENERAL_AD));

after merging the user and system app-default-file lists (preferring
the user version).

Is there a gnome list/group where I could raise the issue of how badly
this violates the POLA?  I could argue that the wildcard resource is
nasty, or that being able override everything except the General.ad
file is odd, or that there should be some way to control the
behaviour.  Or, someone could convince me that this is the way that it
should be (in which case I'll comment it out in the system file...).

g.