On Nov 22, 2008, at 21:26, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
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. :)
Psht... 2008... =p
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.
Right, I agree that we should update what we have in Macports...
that's not at issue here... what's at issue is that libX11 can be
provided by 3 different packages in Macporgs (xorg, XFree86, and xorg-
libX11)... and I'd like to change that to just what is actually
maintained and updated (xorg-libX11)...
As for supporting Tiger (and not intentionally trying to break
Panther), but think that we should still use the lib:... dependency so
that it "works better" on Leopard and SnowLeopard... also, users can
opt to use the macports libs by pulling them in instead of the Tiger
ones...
Perhaps the port:* dep should be used on Tiger and the lib:* dep on
Leopard? I don't really like that option, but I'd be willing to
compromise on it if that would be satisfactory.
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.
Well, the xorg port itself is actually the old monolithic 6.8.2
release. The xorg-server port is actually the latest release...
Perhaps we could update the xorg port to be a meta for xorg-server,
xorg-libX11, etc...
(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.
Agreed...
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.
Does the XFree86 port actually function? It didn't even build last I
tried (granted it was over a year ago, but there doesn't seem to have
been much movement on the port)... and the xorg port is using a
codebase from 3 years ago and hasn't been touched since 2007-08-10...
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