Hi, I know this has come up before, multiple times, and it never goes anywhere. I have a more specific proposal, though, and I think that implementing it would give genuine benefits, while making actual flags possible on the way.
As Tom pointed out on -users a few days ago, performing an Xorg compile takes an age, and a huge amount of it is completely unnecessary: I don't have a Cirrus video card, so compiling XF86-Video-Cirrus is pretty pointless. I would like to have something like VIDEO_CARDS in Gentoo, that would enable compiling just the ones I have. That was the point of modular X, after all. It would also obviate the need to recompile the entire thing for updates to only a small part of it. That would also require being able to tell which parts were already compiled and at what version, which probably means splitting the package out and installing them all into their own /Programs directory. I don't know whether there's a practical problem doing that (library searching?) or whether it's not done just to avoid cluttering /Programs with many XF86-* entries. There would be much less of a problem with clutter under this scheme, since most people would only have four or so of XF86-Video-* and XF86-Input-* installed, rather than all 68. All this would mean a change to the structure of meta-recipes, or possibly dropping Xorg as a meta-recipe altogether. The changes involved in making this happen would also allow for other sorts of conditional dependencies and similar, which is another benefit. The main practical and pragmatic reason for bringing this up right now though is X, and I think it is a tangible benefit. The flow-on effects are a bonus. It would be a fairly big change, and so it'd have to wait until at least the next release cycle, but it's something worth keeping in mind. The specifics of how to implement it I've deliberately left up in the air, but I do have a few ideas for how it could work. I'm interested in what comments other people have to make. -Michael _______________________________________________ gobolinux-devel mailing list gobolinux-devel@lists.gobolinux.org http://lists.gobolinux.org/mailman/listinfo/gobolinux-devel
