[Debian-eeepc-devel] Bug#471521: vga-toggle.sh: does not do XAUTHORITY dance

[Trent W. Buck]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 04:50:49PM +0200, Damyan Ivanov wrote:
> [...] sets XAUTHORITY to /home/root/.Xauthority.
> Ah, could it be the bad home directory? root's HOME is /root!
>
> Changing the code to
>   home=`getent passwd $user | cut -d: -f6`
>   XAUTHORITY=$home/.Xauthority

This is a separate bug and should be split out: eeepc-acpi-scripts
assumes foo's home is /home/foo.

> guesses the home directory OK, but still can't display the notification,
> as the root session is using another file --
> /tmp/libgksu-$random/.Xauthority

> Also, how do you feel about sending notifications to *all* available X
> sessions? My sed-foo is not high enough for this, but I can create some
> grep/cut or awk thing...

I think this issue (allowing notifications to popup on arbitrary
setups, when the root-owned acpid process registers hotkey presses) is
both difficult and arbitrary -- that is, there's not one clearly
"correct" behaviour.

It's worth remembering that users can customize the scripts (since
they're conffiles), and that therefore it's probably best to aim for

  - understandability, so that a regular user can understand the
    scripts enough to tweak them to taste; and

  - rightness, so that the average user doesn't need to make any
    changes at all.

For example, since I always use Ratpoison, I've customized my install
to talk directly to it (RP) instead of using the (much slower,
generic) aosd_cat.  But it would probably be silly to add code to the
default scripts to detect and use Ratpoison, except possibly as a note
in /usr/share/doc/eeepc-acpi-scripts.