[PATCH] xserver: Enable visible cursor on start without -retro #26798

Samuel Thibault samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org
Wed Oct 20 22:46:29 PDT 2010


Dave Airlie, le Thu 21 Oct 2010 12:10:14 +1000, a écrit :
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Samuel Thibault
> <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> > Not having a visible cursor by default poses problems with a lot of users: when
> > they are faced with a completely dark screen without even a moving mouse, they
> > think their machine is completely hung, while it could just be that X clients
> > can't connect or are not starting for some reason.
> 
> NAK on the this needs discussion grounds.
> 
> Seems like this was the whole point of the retro stuff in the first
> place, to not display a cursor and not draw a background.

Well, I can understand that not drawing a background is nicer looking.
But not showing a cursor really apparently really is a pain for the
user.  I _keep_ getting user feedback about "my X server is hung", and
Xorg.0.log posts which of course don't contain fatal error messages,
frustrated users etc.  While the problem often simply is that the user
doesn't have xauth, or such...  See

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26798

Really, not having a cursor poses a real problem: users assuming wrong
things (and I wouldn't even dream a user wondering "what if I passed
that -retro thing to get back into the 1988 to check whether it's really
the X server that hangs", it just won't ever happen).

While having a cross-cursor for a few seconds...  Is it really _so_ ugly
that we want to get those bug reports?  Frankly enough, I think I'll be
thick-headed enough to report on this thread for each user report having
the same issue as mentioned above, just like I did 5 times already
since February (and I'm just talking about Hurd user reports, i.e. an
extremely small part of the Xorg users).

Samuel


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