How to determine modular paths?

[David Nusinow]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2006 at 05:33:19PM -0600, R.L. Horn wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Nov 2006, Andy Ritger wrote:
> 
> >If the command-line argument route is preferrable, that's fine with me.
> >The particular mechanism for querying the modular paths doesn't matter
> >to me, as long as there is a mechanism that is reliably present.
> >
> >Aaron Plattner was kind enough to code up two commandline options,
> >"-showDefaultModulePath" and "-showDefaultLibPath", as functional
> >equivalents to using pkg-config to query moduledir and libdir,
> >respectively.  See attached.
> >
> >Please let me know if there are any objections to that approach.
> 
> No objections, but a couple of observations:
> 
>   Some distinction probably needs to be made between default values and 
> any values altered by config files.  The defaults are hardcoded at build 
> time and don't necessarily reflect the current state.
> 
>   Values returned by the server should be limited to those that the server 
> otherwise "needs to know."  ModulePath and LibDir (which is to say 
> lib/X11) are good examples.  The config search path would also be really 
> nice.
> 
>   In other words, care should be taken to ensure that the server doesn't 
> end up being the authority on things it doesn't really know about.  The 
> locations of C headers and non-dlopened libraries, for example, would be 
> inappropriate.

This brings up a good point. The patch in discussion only prints the
default path, but the ModulePath directive in xorg.conf can change this
path. ModulePath has given us (Debian) well over a dozen bug reports for an
option I'm not sure anyone really uses or even wants.  Would it be all
right if I just make the config parser ignore ModulePath, so that this
patch actually has some meaning and we get rid of xorg.conf bloat?

 - David Nusinow