Setup file for startkde

[David Faure]

On Friday 20 February 2004 12:06, Andy Goossens wrote:
> On Friday 20 February 2004 10:55, David Faure wrote:
> > Here's a proposal for a one-liner addition to startkde, which would allow
> > people to set environment variables to be used by KDE, but also to run
> > programs that set environment variables, like ssh-agent and gpg-agent.
> >
> > I thought of ~/.kde/setup: under ~/.kde in order to avoid cluttering the
> > home dir, but right under there so that it's easy to find/edit. Of course
> > we won't ship such a file by default, but e.g. the instructions for setting
> > up ssh-agent and gpg-agent for KDE would tell people to edit ~/.kde/setup.
> 
> How about making ~/.kde/setup a directory which can contain several scripts to 
> set environment variables? That makes it easier to extend than a single file 
> which stores everything.

I was wondering if someone was going to say that :)
Well, I thought about it, but IMHO it depends on the answer to the following question:
do you expect distributors to put stuff there, or only users, manually?
Can't distributors put the stuff in whichever place launches startkde, instead?
If so, then the setup file is for users only, and it's just simpler if it's a single file...

A simple solution is that startkde sources a single ~/.kde/setup file, but 
distributors could put into that file the code for "read all files from directory xyz/".
Just like zsh reads .zshrc and /etc/zshrc by default, not "everything in a subdir". 
It's the distribution's zshrc that read from subdirs. (same thing with s/zsh/bash/)

It just sounds strange to tell people: "create a setup subdir under ~/.kde and 
then put a file in it named anything.sh" instead of "create a file called setup in 
~/.kde with this in it" (or add those lines to ~/.kde/setup), which is more common.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).