[BRLTTY] In brltty.conf, who has the last word?

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Dear all,

I am always confused by the semantics of brltty.conf and in particular,
if several directives specify different values, which one it is which
will actually be taken into account.

I just checked both the manual
(Documents/Manual-BRLTTY/English/BRLTTY.sgml) and the template for the
installed configuraiton file (Documents/brltty.conf.in) and I think none
of them specifies how BRLTTY handles such a situation.

I am asking this question because I got bitten and here is how.

For years, I had the habbit of editting /etc/brltty.conf.

This did work but was not great as I had to merge my changes with the
distribution-provided configuration file at each package upgrade.

So, at some point after BRLTTY started to support XDG, I created
/etc/xdg/brltty/brltty.conf to store my personal settings andavoid the
merge-at-package-upgrade burden.
But then, I did not need to edit my configuration for a long time and
then next time I had to, I totally forgot the filein /etc/xdg and
started to modify /etc/brltty.conf as I was used to.

Of course these modifications were never taken into account because,
contrary to what I believed, BRLTTY does NOT read both configuration
files. If it finds the XDG one it won't read /etc/brltty.conf, which I am
sure is the right thing to do according to the XDG standard.

So I now think the XDG file somehow should include /etc/brltty.conf but
I am unsure how to do that, should the include appear at the very
beginning or at the end, which is what lead me to raise this question
about theprecedence of configuration directives.

Thanks,

Seb.