What does the Enlightenment desktop (E17) environment variable “PANTS=ON” do?

Question

Installing the Enlightenment Window Manager (E17), results in an environment variable being set:

PANTS=ON

What does this environment variable do? What will happen if I set

PANTS=OFF

Answer 1

As I'm not an active Enlightement developer, I am taking an educated guess.

On the Enlightenment developer mailing list, there are a lot of references, usually in closing, to various states of pants. These appear to be tongue in cheek references meant for humor. It seems to have been started, or at least perpetuated, by lead developer The Rasterman.

pants on! (or skirts... whatever tickles your fancy).
:)

-- 
------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" --------------
The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler)    ras...@rasterman.com

It's probably safe to assume that the environment variable is a nod to this inside developer joke.

Of course the easiest is to set PANTS=OFF and see if it has any obvious effect. If you are very curious, subscribe to the Enlightenment developer list and ask there.

Answer 2

PANTS is the Pants Application Node Transparency System. PANTS enables transparent distributed computing, in a cluster that is using, perhaps, Beowulf. My guess is that PANTS=ON likely enables the use of PANTS, should there be a cluster to use. Setting PANTS=OFF will likely disable the use of PANTS. It's a good question to ask Enlightenment developers.