Regarding X client

[Peter Hutterer]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 09:48:49PM -0500, Grant Taylor wrote:
> On 6/28/23 4:35 PM, Chris Sorenson wrote:
> > That's not even possible anymore, it was way back in the day but now X
> > just immediately exits if there's no window manager to communicate with,
> 
> Like Vito, I question the veracity of your claim.

[...]

> > or, at least that's what happens with my distribution
> > (Slackware 15.0).
> That seems like a distribution configuration ~> limitation to me.
> 
> I've found that there are MANY things that used to be relatively easy to do
> 10-20 years ago that contemporary distributions simply have no concept of
> providing flexibility to support or actively refuse to do anything but the
> top two mainstream DEs / WMs.

The X server has the concept of "generations", each generation is just
"the set of clients until all clients have disconnected". Once the last
client disconnects, the current generation is over and the X server's
behaviour is defined by the commandline options:
* default behaviour: it resets properties and misc other things to the
  default state roughly as if the server was just started from scratch
* -noreset: does nothing special
* -terminate: server shuts down

Both -noreset and -terminate pre-date the git history (dating back to 2003).
Especially -noreset is invaluable for debugging, things are often easier
to reproduce if you have a single client only.

Cheers,
  Peter