On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> Packard's (incomplete) fork of XFree86 in favor of XFree86? Before you
> send us hurtling down this course, I think you owe us some explanation
> of what this is all about, and who the players are.

I have not proposed that it replace XFree86. It is just an alternative,
like we provide blackbox, fluxbox and openbox which are all very similar.

Some may find it more convenient to have separate packages for different
libraries especially when standard XFree86 installs same filenames as
packages we currently use.

We can try to force XFree86 to only provide files we need (so we don't
have conflicts), but this seems like a lot of wasted effort unless XFree86
original distribution makes it easy to do later. And is difficult to do,
because of circular dependencies. I believe part of the problem is that
some gnome-related applications require newer versions of some libraries
than installed with official XFree86.

I got more interested when I started using X11BASE as LOCALBASE (which a
lot of Linux distributions are doing) and noticed the many package
conflicts that couldn't be easily (by me) resolved.

Another benefit to some is that it is quick to update one individual xlibs
component versus retrieving and rebuilding entire XFree86-libs.

By the way, there are also other forks of XFree86. Maybe someday, someone
will package some of the others, and it would be nice to be able to be
able to easily give them a try.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/