[lug] another newbie HOWTO suggestion

[Michael J. Hammel]

Thus spoke Ralf Mattes
> Ok, i think i haven't made my point clear. Of course Themes alone won't
> substitute for the xrdb, but looking at my GNUstep directory i find
> quite a bit of state. The more the two mayor players in the Linux desktop 
> field get established, the more app-state will be kept by those 
> desktop applications. Since these applications sit 'on top' of X 
> their settings will override the settings in the xrdb, or have i got
> this part wrong.

Its not a matter of overriding what xrdb holds, since that is just
a convenience library for managing configurability in X applications.  
xrdb just passes in that state information to the application, which then
has the responsibility to do something with it.  It also keeps that
information around for quick access if needed.  xrdb is nice in that it can
keep separate state files identified by application name (see OReilly's X
Window System User Guide for information on how to manage these files on a
system and on a per user basis).  .Xdefaults is just a fall back file, if
information about application state is not kept anywhere else.  Its use,
however, has been corrupted to be the catch-all for all applications.  I'm
guilty of using it that way myself.

KDE and GNOME can do similar things through other mechanisms.  GNOME, if 
things go as they appear, will probably use CORBA in some way.  Why?  
Mostly because they can, as far as I can tell.  But as for what *will* they 
do, I dunno.  I don't follow either of them that closely. 

Long live FVWM.  :-)
-- 
Michael J. Hammel           |   I hope that after I die people will say of me:
The Graphics Muse           |   "That guy sure owed me a lot of money."
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org  |            Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
http://www.graphics-muse.com