[pkg-fso-maint] Bug#546387: Bug#546387: nodm: set the default pointer

Enrico Zini enrico at enricozini.org
Wed Nov 11 00:03:21 UTC 2009


On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 06:31:10PM -0400, Andres Salomon wrote:
> It would appear that gdm sets the default cursor to left_ptr by default:
> 
> dilinger at mycelium:~/gdm-2.20.9$ grep -r left_ptr .
> ./config/PreSession.in:	"$XSETROOT" -cursor_name left_ptr -solid "$BACKCOLOR"
> 
> It would be nice if nodm did this as well.  When running on a sid system
> with gnome + xmonad + gdm, the default cursor (that is, the one that shows
> up when focus is on the root window) is the left_ptr cursor.  When gdm
> is replaced with nodm (so that's gnome + xmonad + gdm), the default
> cursor is instead the X_cursor cursor.  This looks pretty ugly by
> comparison.
> 
> Calling `xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr` does fix this, but it would
> be nice if it happened automatically.
> 
> Note that window managers can then override the default cursor as well
> (metacity does this); setting the default would just make for a
> nice fallback for those WMs that don't set the cursor.

I went to implement this, then I asked myself: should I actually do it?
How?

Adding system("xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr") to the nodm code doesn't
seem ideal to me. Better would be to add something like: system("sh -c
/etc/nodm/PreSession").

The only point of a PreSession script that comes to my mind, however, is
to share some bits of initialisation across users, so that there is no
need to have them in everyone's ~/.xsessionrc.

However, in nodm it does not make sense to share initialisation across
users, because nodm starts only one session for one fixed user. There is
only one ~/.xsessionrc started by nodm in the system, and so the
PreSession contents can just as well be put at the beginning of that.

On top of that, on my openmoko it may be a good idea to skip that call
to xsetroot to speed up boot a tiny bit, since I never see the mouse
cursor anyway.

I cannot however edit ~/.xsessionrc to provide sane defaults, and you
have a point that not calling xsetroot causes an unexpected behavious of
nodm compared to other display managers.

What could be done is to create a /usr/share/doc/nodm/TIPS piece of
documentation where I list the commands that one may want to add to
their ~/.xsessionrc in order to get a behaviour that is as standard as
possible.

Does the reasoning make sense? Would that address the issue you raised
in this bug?


Ciao,

Enrico

-- 
GPG key: 4096R/E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
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