Public SourceMage Discussion List

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

On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 10:50:50PM +0200, Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik wrote:
> On 20:43:43 2007-04-19 George Sherwood <pilot AT beernabeer.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > I propose we do the following to clean up our X system:
> > > * Remove xfree86* (unmaintained by us for years)
> > 
> > I disagree with this.  I updated xfree86 in November and run it on one
> > machine.  I don't see why would would remove it.
> > 
> 
> here's one reason more and more applications depend on modular specific
> things. xf86 doesn't have anfthing that the latest xorg has i.e. exa they
> are still using xaa last I've heard

exa vs. xaa shouldn't be an issue, as that is in-driver, but it
certainly is a disadvantage of xfree.

> Also as said in some other post it's a completly different build system and
> on disk system it becomes a PITA to support with drivers and stuff.

One of the major differences is that xorg-modular provides pkgconfig
files for every protocol, lib and stuff. Recently, apps have started to
check for those for features support (or as a hard requirement), so
unless someone adds pkgconfig files for xfree, there will be spells
with a hard dependency on xorg-modular as X11-LIBS provider.

The real question is: is there any good reason to keep xfree86? As far
as I have followed the few updates done since xorg came back, it's
mostly driver updates. So is there some hardware setup that works better
in xfree86 than in xorg? That's the only real reason I see for
continuing support.

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