Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 173402
app-defaults/XTerm should be treated as configuration file
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:17 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050810 Red Hat/1.7.10-0.90.1.legacy Description of problem: Updates to the xterm package clobber local customizations to the /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm file. We need to run a custom version of this file because a few things in the default file included in FC4 (e.g. use of UTF-8 fonts) conflicts with the Starnet X-Win32 package we use for remote access to the Linux servers. When the xterm package is updated automatically via nightly yum runs, these changes are lost and X-Win32 can't start xterm on the updated servers. If this file were flagged as %config in the %files section of the .spec file, then at best the yum update would leave the local configuration alone and save the new configuration as an XTerm.rpmnew file, and and worst it would save the local configuration as an XTerm.rpmsave file and warn me that it has done so. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xterm-205-1.FC4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Downgrade to xterm-200-6. 2. Edit /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm to remove utf-8 stuff. 3. Run "yum update". Actual Results: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm customizations were lost. Expected Results: New configuration stored as /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm.rpmnew or custom configuration saved as /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm.rpmsave, and yum should have said what it was doing to that file. Additional info: This problem isn't unique to FC4 either, but this was the latest occurrence of it. It has happened in the past when xterm was updated in older Fedora Core releases.
The supplied app-defaults files are not intended to be used as local configuration files, and they often get modified to fix various bugs. If they were marked as config files, the bug fixes would not get applied to systems which have modified these files. In some cases, the fixes have been security in nature. Local customizations to resource settings should be done via ~/.Xresources or via systemwide configuration in /etc.
What files in /etc can I change to override font definitions, menu definitions, and key translations from the app-defaults/XTerm file, and have them applied to an xterm application launched via rexec, and displaying on a remote, MS-Windows based X11 server? We're not using xinit or xdm, or any Linux-based window manager in the loop at all, so the usual approaches using either /etc/ X11/Xresources or ~/.Xresources won't work for us. I stopped trying to use ~/.Xdefaults a long time ago because it was a pain to maintain all these files in several user directories. I also read recently in another bugzilla bug report for xterm (comment #7 in bug #160354) that ~/.Xdefaults is no longer used by xterm, so that doesn't seem to be a viable option either.