MacOS X11 (was Re: Ann: SWI-Prolog 6.5.3)

On 11/22/2013 01:38 AM, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
>> You can add Contents/MacOS of the app to your $PATH and run the swipl
>> >commandline version after unsetting $DISPLAY.
> This was the key issue:  it never occurred to me that in an environment
> where X11 is not running, $DISPLAY would be set at all.  I now have
>    #!/bin/sh
>    unset DISPLAY
>    exec /opt/local/bin/swipl "$@"
> in my own command folder.

I have the impression that the Mac starts some sort of proxy
for X11.  If some applications talks to the socket, it starts
X11.

>> >That will stop it trying to contact X11.
>> >  There might be something wrong with your Mac.
> I doubt it.  It's the same behaviour on the 10.6.8 laptop,
> my 10.7.5 desktop, and several lab machines running 10.8.something.
> It's also the same enormously long startup time whether it's
> started from SWI Prolog, R, or VisualWorks/Non-Commercial Smalltalk,
> and it was the same when the desktop machine was a physically
> different machine.

Well, on an iMac with a 2.66Ghz Core 2 duo and 4Gb mem running 10.9, I
time 5 seconds.  This isn't really state of the art hardware, I'd say.

>> >  I've got a really old iMac.  Sometimes X11 takes long to start the first
>> >time after an upgrade, but otherwise it is just a few seconds.
> I have_never_  seen X11 start in "just a few seconds" in any version of
> Mac OS X on any hardware.  I just did "open -a X11" again in a Terminal
> and it was 75 seconds before the icon stopped bouncing (longer to do
> anything useful).  Maybe it has something to do with our sysadmins
> having decided that everyone would have their files on a shared file system.
> (My colleague in the next office asked them not to do that to him and they
> didn't.  I asked them never to do that to me, and they did.  Sigh.

I typically try to avoid shared filesystems, except for backup purposes.

	Cheers --- Jan