Problem with $DISPLAY

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Monday October 13 2014 15:27:18 Chris Jones wrote:

> >>>> Any scripts that make any assumptions on what $DISPLAY looks like are
> >>>> flawed by designed...

> Clearly its my opinion, as I stated it. Apologies if that was not obvious.

No, sorry, you phrased your opinion as an absolute truth. I did not edit the quote above.

> search, or interest in doing so) the absence of such documentation does 
> *not* make the documents you quoted the absolute definition of the 
> standard. Xorg's view as Brandon has already stated is a very biased 

No, but remember how I wrote about de-facto standards that evolve over time?

> view towards the way things are in Linux-land.

Correction: Unix. X11 was around (long) before Linux, and no matter how you turn it, OS X *is* a Unix OS.

The question is not if things cannot evolve, or cannot be done differently on any given OS, nor in the absolute "who's right" (and who the "interloper").
The question is whether moving away from the accepted and usual way of doing things is productive.
It's not unlike the debate of case-sensitive vs case-insensive (in fs or code), or having whitespace in filenames. You can do things both ways, but one of the 2 will give more (potential) issues in a context where it's usual to follow to do things the other way.

$DISPLAY is not something that's completely hidden from the user and that s/he will never have to deal with explicitly. All the more reason IMVHO to keep it as simple as possible.

R