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

[Sébastien Hinderer]

Hello,

Dave Mielke (2025/05/21 18:39 -0400):
> [quoted lines by Sébastien Hinderer on 2025/05/21 at 19:36 +0200]
> 
> >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.
> 
> The last one wins, although you'll get a warning. The reason is that
> configurator tools commonly just append to the end of a file if it
> already exists.

Ah nice, many thanks for clarifying this. Will you also document it, or
is it already documented somewhere and it's jsut me looking at the wrong
place?

> >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.
> 
> Which way are you sure it should work?

No I am not sure of anything, really. I assumed BRLTTY would read both
/etc/xdg/brltty/brltty.conf AND /etc/brltty.conf if both exist and I
noticed by using strace that if the first one is found, then the second
will not be read, so I learned something from it.

> Put the include at the beginning. Really, though, it shouldn't matter
> as the provided brltty.conf has all directives commented out.

Okay I got it, thanks. So am I correct that, if desired, it would be
perfectly possible to create a /etc/brltty.conf.d directory and to put
several configuration files into it, that could  then be collectively
included by adding to /etc/brltty.conf something like

include /etc/brltty.conf.d/*.conf

I am asking because it's a way of doing things that exists for other
things, like kernel module configuration.

I am not sure how this convention articulates with XDG, though.

Seb.