Re: proposal: change default X11_TYPE on netbsd-6 to modular

[coypu%sdf.org@localhost]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2017 at 09:01:36AM +0200, Hauke Fath wrote:
> On Mon, 3 Apr 2017 20:17:09 -0500, Jason Bacon wrote:
> > What's the reasoning for maintaining two X11 collections?
> 
> "Native" X11 is cross-buildable, pkgsrc X11 is not.

To expand on this, some differences between pkgsrc and netbsd base X11:
- netbsd X11 has very outdated MesaLib, since the transition to
  requiring LLVM is painful.
- Not all supported platforms on NetBSD have LLVM support, or good
  enough LLVM support. It can be disabled but...
- This may be a penalty for running radeon which is sometimes used also
  on alpha and SPARC. alpha LLVM support is non-existent, and SPARC has
  some bugs which may show up (netbsd/sparc kernels don't boot with
  LLVM).*
- pkgsrc packages often have perl as a required part of the build, and
  perl's custom configure script needs to be run natively to work (I
  haven't tested the theory that other parts of the build work if this
  is done, but they claimed it)
  People have made similar claims about other packages being troublesome.
- Nobody seems to be building packages for these platforms on a regular
  basis right now, so it's codename for "no longer providing X on those
  platforms" :-) it would be nice if it wasn't true in general, but it is.
- Our resident X11 expert mentions that he strongly prefers working on
  code in netbsd than with pkgsrc patches.
- The version in pkgsrc is moving very rapidly. For example, netbsd-6
  building Xorg will now need to first build GCC 4.8 (pkgsrc GCC only
  works on x86 now) to build LLVM 4.0 (currently the build is
  broken...)

Bridging those is possible, but there is a lot of work to be done.
Particularly, "nobody building packages for a platform" is a big one.

There was some discussion that maybe we can switch just x86 to pkgsrc
Xorg (it hurts from the MesaLib situation), but this hasn't happened yet.

* should check if the penalty is real, i.e. lost support existed in the
  first place ;)