The Case for Gconf

Thanks for demonstrating with your example your complete ignorance of how X11 resources work.

X11 resources are held in the X server and can be queried by any X client. They consist of a number fairly flat (technically the use of application names stops them being totally flat) set of key/value pairs. Some applications document what their X resources do in esoteric parts of esoteric man pages, some applications simply don't document them at all (though this is a fault with the applications documentation).

They are typically updated using xrdb. Most people use xrdb once at startup to copy a file held in their home directory (which for some reason was stated as a bad idea) and merge them into the server. There is no (efficient) means to notify the application when its resources change and the resource database is not persistant, it must be manually loaded and saved by the user.

Personally I load 6K of X resources into my X server every time it starts up just to stop Motif drawing everything in bright blue.

Just because the resource manager is built into the X server do not actually make it any good.