[Xquartz-dev] Leopard, Xquartz 2.1.5 and Spawning Problems

[Grant Erickson]

Arguably belatedly, I made the transition from Tiger to Leopard on my
various machines yesterday.

In general, the transition seemed to go smoothly; however, some bumps have
been encountered with X11 (Xquartz 2.1.5 - (xorg-server 1.3.0-apple22)
(2.1.5)).

In particular, either interactively launching a command (e.g. xeyes) from
Terminal.app or launching X11.app directly from the Finder, resulted in the
popular:

3/18/09 5:12:07 PM com.apple.launchd[178] (org.x.startx) Throttling respawn:
Will start in 10 seconds

error. After reading this list and consulting Google, I concluded that
DISPLAY was not the problem and selectively began adding/removing dot (e.g.
.profile, etc.) files from my home directory.

I eventually narrowed it down to my .profile. Within that file, I further
narrowed it down to a few lines:

    if [ -z "${PS1}" ] || [ -n "${ENVONLY}" ]; then
        exit 0
    fi

If I have a .profile with these lines and only these lines, X11 will never
start. If I simply change the above to:

    if [ -z "${PS1}" ] || [ -n "${ENVONLY}" ]; then
        echo "Non-interactive"
    fi

Then X starts normally and whatever command that needed to use the display
runs and realizes its windows, etc. I've been using this .profile for nearly
two decades on all manner of systems including Sun OS, Solaris, Irix,
Cygwin, HP/UX, Darwin, Linux, etc. and have never had a problem with the
above logic. The whole script amounts to:

    # Set umask

    # Add some paths to PATH

    # Exit if non-interactive

    # Interactive setup

What is it about falling off the end of the profile that is OK (should
amount to exit $?) whereas explicitly calling exit 0 causes X11 to choke in
attempting to launch?

Thanks,

Grant