Re: The Guide to getting Point and Click going with Gvim under Ubuntu 18

[David Wright]

On Fri 01 Mar 2019 at 17:04:37 (+1100), Andrew Bernard wrote:
> Hi David and Federico and All,
> 
> All these commentaries are great. But my aim was to document gvim (and not
> even vim) on Ubuntu. I am well aware that there are a dozen editors and
> tens of major Linux distros. I was never intending to write a thick book on
> point and click in general, just trying to clarify one use case that I
> thought applied to me and perhaps others. But I now get the feeling that no
> two people on this list use the same combination of anything, and the idea
> of trying to modify my screed to comprehend every single combination is
> giving me a large headache. I rather regret posting anything at all now.

I think it's useful to get these details out there.

But I wasn't trying to help construct a HOWTO for Debian users here.
Rather, I was trying to look beneath the surface to see what the
essential cogs and levers are that have to be present. If you run
evince, zathura, etc, you might not want to install a gnome DE and,
of course, it's not necessary. You have to know that those xdg-…
procedures are what's really required for gnome3-style apps, but
they're introduced by a paragraph that's less clear than that for gnome2.
Both the headings might say "Using Gnome X-style PDF viewers".

> The main rationale for it is that the Usage manual is lacking important
> info (e.g. environment variable usage for Ubuntu) and factually in error
> about apparmor files, and others seemed to be struggling currently with
> similar setup, albeit on Windows. And that's another thing, although I run
> Windows 10 and also Mac, I am not prepared to write all this for those
> environments as well (because I am not a Windows expert).

Actually, I think there's an error in your reasoning in the apparmor
section, but I'm unable to test it because I have nothing installed
(that I know of) using these files. You wrote:

   Next, edit '/etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.evince' and uncomment the line:

       # Site-specific additions and overrides. See local/README for details.
      include <local/usr.bin.evince>

   [It's right at the end.] The local files provide for extending and adding
   information to the base apparmor files without interfering with them, and
   making system upgrades easier.

But I think you've removed a # that should be left in. AIUI in these
apparmor files:

     # Site-specific additions and overrides. See local/README for details.
     ↑↑ introduced an ordinary comment

     #include <local/usr.bin.evince>
     ↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑ this is an active include line (think C pragma)

So the file as installed on Debian already includes the #include for
the local file. If yours is similar, you might find just above here
some perhaps confusing lines which *are* commented out:

     ##include <abstractions/private-files-strict>
     ↑↑ this is a commented-out include line

     #owner @{HOME}/.mozilla/**/*Cache/* r,
     ↑↑↑↑↑↑ this is a commented-out apparmor "instruction", like deny, 
capability etc.

> In conclusion, I think an informal blog post on Scores of Beauty would be
> useful, and the simplest way to preserve this information, and others may
> want to add posts for other environmental setups.

Wherever, as long as there are cross-references.

I suppose my view is that specifics tied to each viewer (or class
of app, like gnome3's evince/zathura bucket), editor and security
system would be more succinct than opaque narratives on Ubuntu version
this and version that, Debian, Fedore, Suse, Archlinux, bla, bla, bla.
Each critical factor only needs explaining once.

And setting environment variables is on a different axis, based
on the X startup method (as you pointed out). This could be pointed
to from sections like Usage §1.2 Environment variables.

Cheers,
David.