On Fri, 23 Feb 2001, Richard Rauch wrote:

> A tiny correction: NetBSD/i386 1.5 ships with XFree86 3.3.6, not
> 3.3.3.  Not that that helps you a whole lot.  (^&

It's actually 3.3.6 + selected pull-ups from 3.3.9.

> XFree86 4.x can be run on NetBSD/i386.  You can download the sources or a
> binary install set from XFree86.org, or a mirror thereof.  I ran 4.0 under
> NetBSD/i386 1.5_ALPHA from last August till December.  I found that there
> were numerous small wrinkles in using 4.x, and absolutely no benefit for
> me.  So, when I upgraded from 1.5_ALPHA to 1.5 proper, I reverted to the
> stock XFree86 3.3.6 that ships with NetBSD.

Me too. The only problem I noticed was that the font metrics were messed
up in 4.0.1. Does anyone know if that's fixed in 4.0.2?

> If you upgrade X, you should be prepared to rebuild any/all packages that
> you've installed from pkgsrc.

That's not true at all. XFree86 4.0.2 is backwards compatible with 3.3.6.
(No shared libs got major version number bumps.) Even the libraries that
replace packaged libraries are compatible, but to keep the package
database sane, you should deinstall "xpm", "Mesa", and "xfstt", if you
have them, and rebuild "Mesa" afterwards.

> Make sure that you know what packages you want to (re)install before you
> delete all of the ones that you currently have.  (ls /var/db/pkg, and send
> the output to a file, say.  Then you can use the listing as a guide for
> re-building later.  Note that some packages (e.g., Mesa) won't need to be
> rebuilt with XFree86 4.x, since 4.x includes those libraries.)

How about: "for p in Mesa xfstt xpm; do pkg_info -R $p >>LIST; pkg_delete
-r $p; done"? Then upgrade X, and rebuild the packages in "LIST".
Actually, "Mesa" should be rebuilt, too, because it supplies some missing
pieces from the XFree implementation.
 

Frederick