On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 8:30 PM, Alan Coopersmith <[email protected]> wrote: > On 08/27/16 04:40 AM, Aurélien Larcher wrote: >> >> Are we able to simply and effectively deprecate these packages or are >> there issues to foresee? > > > You can probably guess my opinion based on how many of them I've already > obsoleted in https://hg.java.net/hg/solaris-x11~x-s12-clone/ but since > others asked what these do, I can provide some background. > >> pkg:/compatibility/packages/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 >> pkg:/compatibility/packages/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 >> pkg:/compatibility/packages/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 >> pkg:/compatibility/packages/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 >> pkg:/compatibility/packages/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 >> pkg:/compatibility/packages/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 >> pkg:/compatibility/packages/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > These were a transition aid for our package refactoring, when we > went from "Put all the headers for all libraries in SUNWinc, > all the libraries & programs in SUNWplt, all the man pages for > all the programs in SUNWxwman and for all the libraries in SUNWxwpmn" > to following the upstream groupings & IPS model of keeping headers, > man pages, etc. with the software they are for, to allow people > following S10 instructions or using SVR4 packages with old > dependencies to get the same sets of files those used to provide. > > I've not deleted them mostly because they're low cost - there's > little to maintain as they're just dependencies on other packages, > but someday the transition will probably end. > >> pkg:/library/motif/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > This lets you use DPS (see below) in a Motif application. > Two ancient bits mixed together makes something far more obscure! > I have no idea if anything ever used it. > >> pkg:/system/kernel/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > This module provides hardware cursor acceleration for Xsun on SPARC fb > drivers. It's actually a clever little streams module you push on the > mouse stream that causes it to update the cursor directly on the fb driver, > all without ever leaving the kernel to context switch in the X server. > But cleverness isn't useful if you have nothing to use it with, so we > dropped it once Xsun was gone. > >> pkg:/x11/compatibility/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > Long long ago, Sun put all of X in /usr/openwin. > The System V Interface Definition standard needed a vendor independent path, > so said to use /usr/X and allowed Sun to make it a symlink to /usr/openwin. > >> pkg:/x11/library/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > This is the Display Postscript (DPS) client library for old software written > to use this X11 extension. Unless you're displaying to an ancient server > like Xsun that has this deeply proprietary extension, all it does today is > let your software run without complaining the library is missing and query > the server to find the extension isn't there. > > Removing this breaks the ancient OpenWindows AnswerBook display tool that > was obseleted by "point a web browser at docs.sun.com" 2 decades ago, and > the Java SE runtime environment for Java 1.4 and before. Preventing people > from running Java code that hasn't gotten security patches since 2008 seems > like a public service to me. > >> pkg:/x11/library/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > This reads and writes config files for the Xsun server. > If you ever ship the openXsun sources I released shortly before > OpenSolaris.org > died you need it, if not, you don't. > >> pkg:/x11/library/toolkit/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 >> pkg:/x11/library/toolkit/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > These provide backwards binary compatibility for Xaw apps compiled on older > Solaris releases - libXaw4 for those built on Solaris 2.2 or prior (yes, > 1992ish), libXaw5 for those build on Solaris 2.3 through 10. > > libXaw7 is the current version of this, introduced to OpenSolaris in 2008. > >> pkg:/x11/network/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > This is an old solution for using rsh to start X11 apps remotely. > It was superseded by "ssh -X" in the mid-90's. > >> pkg:/x11/network/[email protected],5.11-2013.0.0.0 > > > This package contains the lbxproxy, xfwp, xfindproxy, and proxymngr > utilities > for proxying the X11 protocol over low-bandwidth connections or through a > firewall. > > Over a decade ago, Keith Packard & Jim Gettys compared lbxproxy to ssh with > X11 Forwarding & Compression and found ssh provided equivalent or better > performance and latency to lbxproxy, and concluded: > "LBX does not solve either the authentication and security problems that > SSH solves. We saw little evidence of LBX ever helping. At least as > implemented, LBX looks to have been a bad idea." > - http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2003/ > > As a result X.Org deprecated LBX and dropped support for it from Xorg 1.2 > and later releases, so the Xorg servers in Solaris 10 & later do not have > any LBX support, only older servers like Xsun do. I've never seen anyone > use the others, since SSH X11 tunneling is far easier to setup and more > secure.
Alan, sorry for the delay and thank you very much for your invaluable input. I understand that most of them can be deprecated of left as-is without incuring any cost :) Moreover I really appreciate the background information on the different components, your messages should be compiled into an exhaustive X11 history page :) Best regards Aurelien > > -alan- > > > _______________________________________________ > oi-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/oi-dev -- --- Praise the Caffeine embeddings _______________________________________________ oi-dev mailing list [email protected] https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/oi-dev
