[arch-general] xdm mysteries

[fons at kokkinizita.net]

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 10:46:31PM +0100, Guus Snijders wrote:

> On 21-02-10 00:34, fons at kokkinizita.net wrote:
> >Hello all,
> >
> >Trying to translate some of the entries in
> >
> >/etc/X11/xdm/archlinux/Xresources
> >to Italian I get strange results.
> [...]
> >   Xlogin*namePrompt:Nome d'utente\040:
> >   Xlogin*passwdPrompt:Parola d'ordine\040:
> >
> >just give me the defaults.
> 
> Looking at this from a shell perspective, i'd say it has a problem
> with the "'" (single quote) char. In some programminglanguages you
> can escape it with a "\", i'm not sure about this file, though.
> But maybe you could try that.
> 
> Your namePrompt would become:
> Xlogin*namePrompt:Nome d\'utente\040:

That doesn't work.

It works only if both the space and the ' are written
as octal: Nome\040d\047utente:\040

This is strange, as normally no escapes are required
in xrdb values. The man page explicitly mentions 'any
character except non-escaped newline', and that is also
my experience when using e.g. ~/.Xresources. Normally
leading spaces are stripped, trailing ones are not, and
there's no further translation.

The problem seems to be typical to xdm, doing its own
processing on the string supplied by the xrdb.

OTOH, the fixed 'Password:' is probably the result of
this prompt being taken from PAM rather than from the
resources. I've not yet found out how to change it there.
Setting an Italian locale doesn't affect it.

Thanks for your reply, ciao

-- 
FA

O tu, che porte, correndo si ?
E guerra e morte !