Re: How often is in-tree Xorg updated?

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:59:51 +0100
    From:        Rhialto <rhialto%falu.nl@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20100223205951.GG12520%falu.nl@localhost>

  | In the end, I eliminated these:
  | 
  | #.include "../../x11/libXfixes/buildlink3.mk"
  | 
  | and the resulting Xorg still runs as before.

Others eliminated edited away here, but that one is great
news - because that's the one package that's incompatible
between (old) XFree (as still in NetBSD 4) and xorg - they
have different Xfixes packages, and at the same time is shared
between server and clients.

That one made it difficult to do what should have been a
trivial task - to replace the X server on my (more or less 4.0BSD)
system with an xorg server (the Xfree one had too many bugs) without
requiring all the applications to be rebuilt (in particular, without
needing to rebuild all my pkgsrc stuff, which can take weeks
of compiling...)

That should be totally painless, as in X the server and the clients
are divorced, aside from the protocol they speak between them, no
software should need to be shared, except that everything was using
the same set of ubiquitous "fixes" (both server and clients for Xfree,
and a different set for both server, and clients, for Xorg).   And
of course, the two sets of fixes install (some of) the same files,
so they have to conflict.

Had I known that the xorg server didn't really need those fixes,
everything would have been much simpler (as it was, I used a hack
whereby I temporarily moved away my /usr/pkg and /var/db/pkg, built
the Xorg server from pkgsrc, copied the Xfixes .so file it installed
to the real /usr/pkg and then put everything back the way it was).
Extremely ugly, but it worked.

That's also what first inspired me to start building everything with
pkg_comp, which by itself doesn't solve this problem, but at least
makes he downtime when the fiddling was going on much much shorter.

kre