Subject: Clarifying the purpose of /etc/papersize?

From: [email-masked]
Date: 3 Jun 1996 23:26:42 -0000

If it's easy to do, it makes sense to have /etc/papersize be a runtime
option.  If it's hard to do (must be propagated throughout a number of
files), it makes sense to have /etc/papersize be an installation time
option.

I don't know of any instances where it's hard to do.

-- 
Raul

---

From: Yves Arrouye <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 22:44:08 +0200

Sven Rudolph writes:
 > I assume this interpretation too. When a configuration file changes
 > the program should use this changed information as soon as possible.
 > 
 > On the other hand this implies some work. This work were even more
 > useful if this were a standard on other systems too.
 > 
 > Your libpaper seems to be a useful tool, however a whole library for
 > such a tiny problem might be overkill. (Having files in a standardized
 > format in /etc/defaults (or so, I didn't read the whole discussion
 > around this) and writing a library for accessing these were a more
 > general solution.)

The purpose of the library is not really to save code (it is really
tiny---7028 bytes at the moment) but rather to be sure that all programs
that use this code to manage a paper size will get the same definitions
for a given paper.

As for the /etc/defaults dir, if I understood well, it will contain many
files, one of them naming the preferred paper. But there may still be
some need for ensuring that all programs given an exotic paper size
will get its dimensions right.

Yves.