On Sat, 9 Oct 1999, Hubert Feyrer wrote:

> Well, we could of course fix X, make it conform to hier(7) and then go and
> pkgize it, like it was back in the 1.3 days (and before!)... 

i won't comment on pkg-izing X--i have an opinion on this but don't want
to open a discussion about it now.  But if the directory layout was
``fixed'' in 1.3, what was the original motivation for changing it back?  
can you remember?

I've noticed a lot of vendor UNIXes have incredibly odd directory layouts,
like Sun used to have all that stuff in /usr/openwin, and HP puts their X
libs and their normal libs all in the same place, and X includes in
/usr/include/X11.  I'm sure there are odder changes--this is just what i
can remember.

The vendor X installs seem to ``just work'' most of the time, for apps
that use imake at least.  Would moving things around for the benefit of
people who share one X tree among several ports really break that many
apps, or could the changes be accurately enough rendered into the cf files
that imake apps wouldn't notice?

It looks like LIBDIR (/usr/X11R6/lib/X11) is the biggest mess, since this
is considered one place for stuff by the cf files and contains things that
belong in many different places.  I've been trying to rearrange it crudely
with symlinks at my site, and so far almost the whole thing seems
share-able.  There are two libexec's--rstartd.real and xkbcomp--the latter
exists in duplicate in /usr/X11R6/bin.  There is the xdm mess, which
includes stuff for lib/, libexec/, /etc, /var/run, and /var/log--a
well-known pain. There is the rgb database (is that MI?).  Anything else?

I did a 'find . -type f | file | grep -v text' a while ago, and the above
is the quick list i came up with.

So, everything I've found so far looks
 (a) not too hard to fix, and 
 (b) not likely to break app builds

This seems to come up a lot--can you fill me in on the history of this X
directory thing that i'm missing?

-- 
Miles Nordin / v:1-888-857-2723 fax:+1 530 579-8680
555 Bryant Street PMB 182 / Palo Alto, CA 94301-1700 / US