problem with xset

[Alan Coopersmith]

Mike Oliver wrote:
> On 05/17/10 15:09, JD wrote:
>> Hi Mike.
>> I tried it, and it fails.
>> What's with the Xlib extension error?
>>
>>
>> $ xset r rate 2 500
>> Xlib: extension "XFree86-Misc" missing on display ":0.0".
>> xset: unknown option 500
> 
> The 'r' argument section of the 'xset' man page I have here says:
> 
>   If the server supports the XFree86-Misc extension, or the XKB extension,
>   then a  parameter of 'rate' is accepted and should be followed by zero,
>   one or two numeric values.  The first  specifies the delay before
>   autorepeat starts and the second specifies the repeat rate.   In the
>   case that  the  server  supports the XKB extension, the delay is the
>   number of milliseconds before autorepeat starts, and the rate is the
>   number of repeats per second.
> 
> Based on the error message, presumably your X server doesn't provide the
> required extensions, so the 'xset r rate ...' command will fail when run
> against this server.  (I'm not certain, but I think xset's willingness
> to use the XKB extension is a recent addition.  If your 'xset' is old
> then it might not know how to work with XKB and might depend entirely
> on XFree86-Misc.)

Recent versions of Xorg have dropped XFree86-Misc.

Unfortunately, xset versions before last year's 1.1 release had a bug in which
they checked for it incorrectly and reported the missing extension, even when it
wasn't present or going to be used (since XKB is preferred if available - and
since recent versions of Xorg are impossible to compile without XKB, it should
always be available).

If it actually fails to work, it should print instead:
	server does not have extension for "r rate" option

If you don't get that, then either XKB or XFree86-Misc should have accepted the
change.

As for the "unknown option 500", it appears that xset requires the second
argument to be <= 255, and if it's not ignores it, letting the rest of the
option parser choke on it.   (Sorry, the xset option design is absolutely
horrid, and some day we need to create a new command with a standard CLI to
replace it.)

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System