At 9:25 PM +0100 1/6/03, Martin Costabel wrote:
I haven't been lurking on fink-devel long enough to have insight into what the earlier debates on this were, but I have always found it strange that fink still separates the server from rest of XFree86. Sure you can think of scenarios where someone might want the X libraries installed and not the X server, but these are largely artificial. As people have pointed out you are only saving 5-10% of the size of the distribution by separating out the server and there is a very real complexity cost for doing so. There are other parts of the XFree86 distribution one might want to separate out as well that save even more space. Why is the server special?Bruce Korb wrote:Jeff Whitaker wrote:Why force people to install xfree86-rootless if they don't really need to?Because is solves real, multi-hour problems. The cost is very marginal: systems that need x-base and not x servers and their price is only a few minutes of install time. The disk space is only worth mentioning that it is sub-marginal.Yes, exactly.
I think the reason is largely historical. Back in the XFree86 4.1.0 days there was no rootless X server, only a full screen one. There was, however, a rootless X server that mostly worked under development in the top of the XFree86 CVS tree. Christoph Pfisterer wanted fink users to be able to use the rootless X server from the top of the tree without having to worry about upgrading the libraries and everything else as well. Thus he separated the packages, which worked at the time. These days it does not even make sense to use an X server and libraries from different XFree86 tags because the server depends on the libraries. Today people either live with the last stable version or the cutting edge, but they upgrade server and libraries together.
Since there is no longer any desire to update the server and the rest of XFree86 separately, keeping the two in separate packages seems to complicate things for no reason.
--Torrey
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