[Xquartz-dev] Fully self contained Xquartz.app?

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Jul 13, 2010, at 10:03, doh123 wrote:

> I'm having issues making some modifications to Xquartz, I was  
> wondering if I might get some pointers to... one of which I think  
> could benefit as a change to how Xquartz.app works...  I'm not that  
> up on Xquartz source code and not an extremely experienced  
> programmer, its just kind of a hobby thing.
>
> I've been working on a way to make a fully self contained  
> Xquartz.app and not have a /opt or whatever install location.  This  
> is actually easy to do with the current code as long as I want the  
> Xquartz.app to always be in the same exact place... but when I want  
> it to be movable, and the .app to be launchable from any location on  
> the system, it runs into problems.  I'm pretty sure the only problem  
> I have left is the fact that xkb wants a hard coded location (dylibs  
> are easy to move around and find)... so any tips or ideas what I can  
> do in the source to make that location movable would be greatly  
> appreciated.  I think this would actually be beneficial to Xquartz,  
> making it more like a real Mac app.

The problem lies in the fact that "X11" is more than just the server.   
Users expect a set of command line utilities to be present.  Sure, you  
could place those somewhere like XQuartz.app/Contents/bin and have  
that path added to $PATH ... as part of this, you'd also want to put  
the libraries in XQuartz.app/Contents/lib and do some magic setting  
the ids of the libs to be @executable_path/../lib/libXWhatever.1.dylib  
(note that this way it resolves correctly for MacOS/X11.bin and bin/ 
xwininfo)

The real problems lie in xkb utilities, xrdb, xinit, etc which all  
have compile-time paths set.  You'll need to modify all those  
utilities to get hints from the environment (or their own path) to  
figure out where their data is.

All in all, this is really more trouble than it is worth, IMO...

As it is right now, you can move around XQuartz.app just fine.  Also,  
many other .apps have extra data outside their .app bundle.


> I'd also like to know how to switch Xquartz from fullscreen to  
> rootless and back.. without having to click the preference checkmark  
> option, use key combinations or restart the server.  A way I could  
> tell it from the command line or whatever so that it can be a  
> scripted change... if thats not currently possible, where should I  
> look in the code to change that around?  This is at least until  
> RANDR works...

That's not currently possible.  Look at the kXquartzSetRootless  
handler in darwinEvents.c

> These changes are to fix issues I have with how I use Xquartz built  
> into Wineskin (http://wineskin.doh123.com/), but I really think  
> making a fully self contained app would benefit Xquartz.

I haven't heard back from Jan about the RandR changes, so I think I'll  
just start with her patches and try to get something usable in 2.6.0.   
If you're interested in getting RandR working and testing it with  
wineskin, that would help out.

--Jeremy

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 3333 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/xquartz-dev/attachments/20100713/329f2336/attachment.bin>