Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2006 at 04:21:51PM -0800, Eric Sandall wrote:
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> On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Arwed von Merkatz wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 02, 2006 at 10:48:14AM -0800, Eric Sandall wrote:
> >> How close is the xorg-modular grimoire to being integrated into devel
> >> (and then hopefully test ;))?
> >
> > The spells themselves seem to be coming along nicely. Before it can be
> > integrated there's some work left for the really big list of CONFLICTS
> > this needs.
> > What we really should decide soon is whether to continue supporting
> > monolithic X versions or not. The monolithic xorg spell will definitely
> > go once the modulars are ready, but there's the xfree* and xdirectfb
> > ones.
> > Pro:
> > - choice, users can choose to use xfree instead of xorg
> > Con:
> > - will require several providers for the various X libraries that aren't
> >  strictly requiered by xorg-server as those will eventually become
> >  optional_depends for various spells. Some of them don't exist in
> >  xfree, other do exist and thus have to be provided by the modular
> >  spell and the monolithic ones.
> >
> > Except for choice I see no reason to continue supporting xfree, and the
> > choice part is mostly superfluous too, there's no technical reason to
> > choose xfree over xorg, and lots of reasons to choose xorg. I don't
> > think that choice is important enough to warrant the work of maintaining
> > the monolithic builds (which are a real pain to work with in spells), so
> > in my opinion we should drop xfree*.
> > xdirectfb is essentially a hardware abstraction dropin for xfree and
> > xorg, I just had a quick glance and it might be possible to integrate
> > that as an option in the xorg-server spell instead of building it inside
> > a monolithic tree.
> 
> If we can have all the functionality that the xfree86* packages
> deliver (e.g. xfree86-libs) then I'd be okay with removing them
> (thanks to Flavien for the summary of xfree86* users ;)).

Since modular is actually split into programs/libs/drivers/...,
something like only X11 libraries (which xfree86-libs provides) is much
easier to do than with the old monolithic build.

> We'd of course want to provide a safe update path from xfree86* ->
> xorg/xorg-modular.
> 
> One issue with xorg-modular is some of the configuration changes (such
> as Flavien found with "dvorak" layout and mouse auto-detection).
 
Both true. I think at least part of those (the update path) can only be
completely dealt with once -modular is in the main grimoire, as it'll
probably need dependency modifications (mostly for optional_depends) of
several spells.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org