Re: [gentoo-dev] modular X - 7.0 RC1

[Dan Armak <danarmak@gentoo.org>]

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On Thursday 20 October 2005 20:37, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> I'd prefer that people don't come to depend on metabuilds at all. 
OK, we can do this.

> See 
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~spyderous/xorg-x11/porting_to_modular_x_howto.txt.
That file says there won't be any x11-related virtuals anymore. Are you sure 
no package uses it in the sense of 'any X server' instead of 'any X client 
libs+headers'?

> Couple of ideas here.
>
> 1) We do as you suggest, and make people emerge xorg-x11
> 2) KDE could add a USE=X and dep X? ( xorg-server )

(2) is bad for several reasons:

Firstly, as I said in my other replies, this would change the current meaning 
of the X USE flag. The original meaning would stay without a flag.

Today it means 'enable support for clienside X11'. You want to make it mean 
'install X11 server'. If I'm building a headless box without an X11 server, 
but I do want to emerge KDE and run it over ssh -Y from another box, I need 
two useflags to specify this. But even if we introduce a new USE flag 
'Xserver', on by default where X is on by default, and used as you describe 
above, the problems I describe below will remain.

Secondly, there can be more than one X11 server (kdrive, etc). Depending on 
xorg-server is bad. If anything, we should introduce a virtual/x11-server.

Thirdly, it's a 'convenience dep': whether xorg-server is installed or not 
won't affect the behavior of KDE in any way (given a working DISPLAY 
setting).

Finally, it requires that extra change to (ideally) all X11 client apps. It's 
not intuitive, and so easy to forget when writing new ebuilds.

> We will still install some fonts, but not all, and I'll note that in the
> metabuilds text.
Which ones? Selected how? I'm asking because I don't want to work too hard on 
deciding which fonts KDE should depend on :-)

-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Public GPG key: http://dev.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
Fingerprint: DD70 DBF9 E3D4 6CB9 2FDD  0069 508D 9143 8D5F 8951

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