Suggestion for improving xinit 1.3.4

[Laurens Blankers <laurens@blankersfamily.com>]

Hi,

As requested [1] a separate thread for suggesting improvements to xinit,
in order to solve some of the issues people have been having since the
release of 1.3.4-1 [2].

1. Handling of empty .startxwinrc
Given the new behaviour of startxwin having an empty is never a correct
configuration. It would be really nice if startxwin could check for a
zero length .startxwinrc and in that case just start the X server
without any programs, as it used to do in 1.3.2-1. This would solve a
problem reported several times [3, 4] and also solve the problem of
having an icon on the task bar for 'sleep inf' [5].

2. Adding a hint about 'sleep inf' to the FAQ
Not everyone reads the release notes, most people, when running into
problems will read the FAQ first. How about adding an entry similar to
this one:

Q: startxwin exits immediately on start-up without error
A: ~/.startxwinrc must be executable and block or else X server will
exist, adding a 'sleep inf' to the end of the file should help, also see [2]

3. Adding 'listen' option to the FAQ
Consider adding something similar:

Q: X server is no longer accepting client connections, how come?
A: For security reasons, by default the X server no longer listen for
tcp connections, if you really want this add '-listen' to the start-up
parameters.

Also see [6].

4. Semantic versioning
Signalling major changes in the version number makes it a lot easier to
find the problem, at least for me. Semantic versioning [7] suggest does
thing. Practically this would have mend calling the latest release
2.0.0-1 rather than 1.3.4-1. No additional effort required, but a clear
signal to people to read the release notes.

I hope these suggestions don't require too much work. I think they would
have a significant positive impact on UX.

Laurens

[1] https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2015-01/msg00012.html
[2] https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2014-11/msg00029.html
[3] https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2014-12/msg00012.html
[4] https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2014-12/msg00013.html
[5] https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2014-12/msg00059.html
[6] https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2015-01/msg00013.html
[7] http://semver.org/


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