urxvt and ~/.Xdefaults

[Michael V. De Palatis]

Hi list,

I have decided to go back to using urxvt (a.k.a. rxvt-unicode) as my
default X terminal. However, I have hit some snags. If I try to use
update-alternatives to set urxvt as my default terminal, starting
either "x-terminal-emulator" or "rxvt-unicode" at the command line
results in a terminal that has not respected my options in
~/.Xdefaults. This does *not*, however, happen if I start it as
"urxvt".

After doing a bit of reading, it turns out that this is some crazy
Debian issue because the maintainer decided that he doesn't think that
this is "flexible" enough and uses a completely different method that
apparently reads a global configuration file (see
/usr/share/source/rxvt-unicode/README.Debian). However, this doesn't
really tell me what I have to do to change this, in my opinion, stupid
behavior.

I am at wits end trying to figure out what I need to do short of
downloading the non-Debian patched source. Does anyone have any tips
on getting this working?

Thanks,

Mike