'Re: why was XFree86 dropped for ports?'

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List:       freebsd-chat
Subject:    Re: why was XFree86 dropped for ports?
From:       Chuck Robey <chuckr () telenix ! org>
Date:       2009-04-01 20:09:39
Message-ID: 49D3CA03.4090208 () telenix ! org
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I can't justify keeping this is ports any longer, I think it violates the list's
rules, no matter how much I like this thread, so I'm moving it to -chat.  If you
think I'm wrong, I guess it could be moved again.

matt donovan wrote:

> <snip>
> 
> 
> 
>     I don't know git anywhere's near as well as I know cvs, but it seems
>     to me that
>     xorg doesn't have any TAGS so you can't ask for a particular
>     release, isn't that
>     true?  I think that is probably a comment on git, not Xorg.  I
>     guess, seeing
>     that there's about 1/4 the amount of work involved in updating
>     xFree86 versus
>     Xorg, I didn't expect that it was a work thing.  Finally, I really
>     don't like
>     the fact that Xorg comes in all of those little packages, so that
>     without our
>     ports system, it might be prohibitively difficult to assemble Xorg.
>      Like it
>     would be, I suppose, for KDE.  I *like* how you can deal with
>     XFree86 as one
>     item.  If there was some way to get KDE as one compileable tarball,
>     that would
>     be a good thing also.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Xorg doesn't fully need to be recompiled it was one giant package until
> they decided it would be easier for developers to break up the system to
> smaller ones. For instance lets say x-server 1.6 came out called xorg
> 7.5 well you will only have to recompile x-server really.
> 
> Also I went by Xfree86 webpage which states last stable release is from
> December 2008 before that it was Aug. 2007

Actually, seeing as the subdirectories of Xorg aren't linked into any overall
Makefile, you usually need to use some shell script, in order to compile Xorg,
and I think that's one big reason it takes so long to build.  If things can't
take advantage of Make's ability to detect date stamps on things and actually
reasonably determine what to build and what to skip, then of course it takes
longer.  I can't really understand why they decided to skip that part of things,
even keeping their separate packages.  An example of what I mean, if you build
all of our ports (I really mean just a subdirectory like maybe devel or
graphics) and then decided to issue the "make" again (just the default make,
like a make all) and checked the timing, the time for the second run thru would
be a tiny fraction of the first run, all because our make detects the presence
of things (in our case, cookie files) and does things really faster.  I don't
see why Xorg would skip this step, it only need them to specifyu the use of a
hierarchy, and a top Makefile.  Both easy to do.  I think they took their
breaking things up way too far.

I have to say here, probably, that xorg develops things at a way faster rate,
I've seen that's true.  I haven't yet done a rebuild of the latest XFree86, I
wonder if they even have things like compiz ... kde4.2 has convinced me that
it's necessary.  I guess I just wish that the Xorg folks didn't do such a
complete job of breaking things up.

I was hoping that someone else, someone who knows git better than I, would
validate for me the point, dies git have tags (I saw that Xorg uses git)?  Maybe
it feeds from my imperfect understanding of git, but it seems to be missing any
ability either to tag something as "RELEASE_14", or to ask for a current release
from any particular branch.  I'm not saying it's this way, I am saying that I'm
wondering if it is, cause I couldn't spot anything like it when I looked over
the docs.  If you know git well enough, could you comment on that?  Cause, if it
were true, I guess I would consider myself justified in staying away from most
git things (I *like* tags and branches, and tracking current).  It seems to work
really well for Linux, though, but I guess everyone knows about the massive
differences in BSD development versus Linux.

> 

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