On Nov 22, 2008, at 23:00, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
For those of you who don't know me, I took over development of X11
in OSX when Ben Byer moved on to bigger and better things at the
beginning of 2009.
Shhhh! I thought people weren't supposed to know you have a time
machine. :)
I've been poke, prodded, nudged, and otherwise motivated into
trying to "fix the X11 problem in Macports" as well... so I figured
I'd make some proper introductions, and offer some suggestions to
see what everyone's thoughts are on the subject before I start
changing things only to have 100 people lash out at me for
"breaking" something... so here goes...
1) The dependency issue
X11 lives in a grey area in Macports' dependency policy. X11 is
actually given as the example for something that is appropriate to
use the lib:* or bin:* dependency rather than a port:* dependency,
yet there are plenty of ports that are still using a port:
dependency. I believe this is mainly for things like libXrender
(rather than libX11) as a legacy of what was available in Tiger's
X11. I'd very much like to use anything in /usr/X11/* over
installing a duplicate in /opt/local, and I'm sure others are in
the same boat. I have seen a fair share of bug reports on xquartz-
dev that came about simply because the macports version didn't have
a fix that was in the system version or macports config files (eg:
for fontconfig) didn't match system configurations, so users were
wondering why some fonts weren't available in some programs.
I intend to go through all the x11 related ports and update
dependencies to be lib: or bin: where appropriate instead of port:
(if a port is not nomaintainer or openmaintainer, I will file a bug
in trac to be on the safe side... unless general consensus here is
that such reports would be overkill and I should just do it myself)
2) The other dependency issue
Now, for what port to actually depend on... Quickly grepping though
the code, I have seen the following dependencies for libX11:
lib:libX11.6:XFree86
lib:libX11.6:xorg
lib:libX11:XFree86
lib:libX11:xorg
lib:libX11:xorg-libX11
I'd like to standardize this to be xorg-libX11
We did have consensus and standardization: everything that needed X11
declared a dependency on "lib:libX11.6:XFree86". Then some people
started changing some ports to "lib:libX11.6:xorg" for an unknown
reason.
As I understand it, the reason we have a policy exception to allow
Apple X11 to be used instead of XFree86 or xorg in MacPorts is that
Apple X11 integrates nicely with Mac OS X. I've never used xorg in
MacPorts, but I tried installing XFree86 some time ago and when it
launched, it had a weird cursor, weird window behavior, it launched 5
weird-shaped and weird-colored terminal windows I couldn't figure out
how to deal with, and it was just a very off-putting experience. I
figured I didn't know what I was doing, uninstalled it, and returned
to Apple X11 which always worked great.
My initial impression is that we shouldn't have a policy exception
for everything Leopard's X11 provides, however. fontconfig, xrender,
etc. are surely newer in MacPorts than they are in Tiger, and we
still support Tiger, and some people even still use MacPorts on
Panther. If there are things in Leopard's X11 that are newer than
what we have in MacPorts, then let's update what we have in MacPorts.
If a MacPorts port configuration (you say fontconfig?) doesn't
integrate well with the OS, then let's fix that port.
3) The old monolith xorg and XFree86
I'd like to eventually punt these in favor of having just one X11
solution in Macports based on the latest release.
I have no problem with changing the recommended non-Apple X11 from
XFree8 to xorg for example. (I understand that Apple's X11 switched
from being based on XFree86 to being based on xorg, and that would be
a fine reason to also prefer xorg as the fallback in MacPorts.) If
that's decided, then it should be done in all ports at once.
Otherwise people are left wondering why some ports depend on one X
implementation and others on another.
As long as both projects continue to exist and function on current
OSes, there's no reason to delete one or the other, however, is
there? Choice is a good thing, and we certainly have other cases of
duplicate functionality in ports.
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