Re: [XBoard-devel] git issues

[h.g. muller]

> A freshly installed user program that wants to write by default to a 
> system configuration file (i.e. one in the /etc directory) would be *very* 
> uncommon in Linux (and against the very idea of system configuration files 
> which are supposed to be shared by all users).
>
> There is usually system wide configuration file (or directory) created at 
> install time and a user specific one created when the user runs the 
> program for the first time. For example I have /etc/firefox-3.5 and 
> ~/.mozilla/firefox-3.5/   (and  I wouldn't expect firefox to dump a 
> configuration file in every
> directory I run it from....).
>
> In easy cases it is possible to dispense with the system wide 
> configuration file.

Well, you say the magic word: "installed". As long as they use "make install",
and we make sure this creates the /etc/xboard/xboard.conf, defining a 
default for
the user settings file, everything works smoothly. They would only have 
problems
when they do not properly install xboard.

When /etc/xboard/xboard.conf contains the lines:

-saveSettingsFile ~/.xboard/xboard.conf
-settingsFile ~/.xboard/xboard.conf

a user would only get complaints on saving when ~/.xboard did not exist, and
presumably he would be able to figure out how to solve that. (The alternative
would be to make XBoard iteratively try to create all directories in the path.)

And crazy users like me would be happy as well, because they would simply
change the ~/.xboard/xboard.conf into ./xboard.ini, to get the behavior they
desire.