Um, the .geomview-* files are not related to emacs at all!
They are external module ("emodule") definition files. The idea, when we
originally set it up, was that each external module would have such a file,
and its purpose it to tell Geomview how to invoke that module, and what name
to give it in Geomview's list of external modules. When a module is
"installed" into Geomview, the corresponding emodule definition file would
get copied into Geomview's external module directory, along with the module
program itself. When Geomview starts up, it looks for all files starting
with ".geomview-*" in its external module directory in order to determine
which modules are installed.
Before we added this feature, external modules had to be installed in
Geomview by adding a line for each one to Geomview's global config file.
That was a pain, though, and we decided it would be much slicker if a module
could install itself by simply putting a file in some directory that
Geomview would notice.
We decided to have the emodule definition files start with a dot so that
they wouldn't clutter up directory listings of the module directory (we
wanted the modules themselves to be visible, but not their associated
definition files). We had no clue, when we did this in 1992, that 14 years
later it would be misinterpreted as a security threat!
Anyway, it's fine with me if someone wants to change the names of these
files. The simplest thing would be to just drop the initial '.'. That
would involve changing each external module and/or its Makefile, and
changing the part of Geomview that looks for the files, which is in the file
src/bin/geomview/commonworldio.c.
--Mark
On 12/7/06, Lloyd Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At Thursday 07/12/2006 05:06 +0000, Lloyd Wood wrote:
>I've permitted this post and added this address to the accept list.
>
>if you only posted from one address that was actually subscribed to
geomview-users, life would be easier. And you'd see replies too!
Oh, good - I think I've now finally managed to fix the geomview-users
list's Reply-To behaviour! (Which will, alas, further discourage people from
subscribing to the list, leading to more non-spam posts to approve...)
invisible dot files are usually user-specific and installed in a home
directory.
Geomview doesn't seem to use user-specific dot files (no .geomview-sweep
in ~/) ; this must be an artefact of make install behaviour.
.geomview-sweep is created in:
http://geomview.cvs.sourceforge.net/geomview/geomview/src/bin/sweep/Makefile.am?revision=1.9&view=markup
as an emacs module definition, which I suppose only makes sense on a
per-user basis if that user is actually using emacs. I don't know about
other files in /usr/lib/Geomview - are they also emodule definitions?
SaVi has a similar .geomview file:
(emodule-define "SaVi" "./savi -geomview")
which has survived all this time because I've never figured out what to do
about it - and that should probably be removed for much the same reason.
How does emacs actually use these files?
L.
>At Wednesday 06/12/2006 12:14 -0600, Steve M. Robbins wrote:
>>Hello,
>>
>>A Debian user filed the following request:
>>
>> geomview puts a number of files in /usr/lib/geomview with names
>> such as .geomview-sweep. chkrootkit flags these up as being
>> suspicious, and indeed it is unusual to have dot-files installed
>> by a package.
>>
>> Any chance of changing this?
>>
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=357445
>>
>>
>>I got another request for this today, so I thought I'd see whether
>>someone (Claus?) wanted to have a crack at this while overhauling
>>geomview.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>-Steve
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Mark Phillips
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