At Fri, 09 Sep 2011 04:39:36 +0200, Jean-Yves Migeon
<jeanyves.migeon%free.fr@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Re: Advice sought: which X11 for NetBSD 5.* (going forward) ??
>
> I am not sure it's a matter of choice; the X server has always been a
> big part of the src tree, and was integrated inside because it was
> convenient (it could reuse the cross-compilation framework that exists
> in src and a release could be shipped with a working X server).
It's not just a matter of "convenience" IMO.
If I can't trivially cross-compile X along with the rest of the system
then it makes it extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, for me to
make even X clients available on some target systems I use.
If I understand correctly the X.org folks have also been moving away
from Imake and instead are moving towards GNU Autotools. Although this
does potentially offer the possibility of cross-compilation, it's
nowhere near as trivial as with the NetBSD build environment.
Indeed many of us would say the move to GNU Autotools is a negative
thing. Imake wasn't great, but it wasted fewer cycles (programmer and
CPU) than Autotools, perhaps by orders of magnitude.
Of course X11 (or even just some of its components) isn't the only
third-party source one might often want to include in a system build
with full cross-compilation. The mechanisms of the src/external are
getting cleaner and easier to manage, but they're still far from easy to
use (IMO). I'd like to see it more easily usable and extensible so that
third party developers such as myself could trivially add additional
packages to such that we could entirely avoid pkgsrc for some kinds of
builds. I can write Makefiles for stuff I want to build -- that's no
the hard part -- the hard part is hooking in my own modules, including
all the src/distrib/lists stuff, etc. For me currently it's easier to
just plunk the sources to additional packages I want in the system build
right into the /usr/src/{*bin,*lib} directories and pretend they are
part of the core system -- extending the src/distrib stuff as necessary.
The whole src/external stuff just gets in my way as it is now.
--
Greg A. Woods
Planix, Inc.
<woods%planix.com@localhost> +1 250 762-7675 http://www.planix.com/
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