Re: [gentoo-dev] xorg-server 1.0.99/1.1 ABI break

[Donnie Berkholz <spyderous@gentoo.org>]

Thomas de Grenier de Latour wrote:
> What about a big PDEPEND in xorg-server-1.1 ebuild, with a bunch of
> "video_cards_foobar? ( >=x11-drivers/xf86-video-foobar-NewVersion )"?
> That should be enough to force a smooth update of the video drivers
> after the server. And, the RDEPEND on video drivers could be removed
> from the xorg-x11 meta-ebuild, to avoid redundancy.

That's a very reasonable idea in the current situation. The problem is 
that the xorg-server ebuild will begin building more and more X servers 
based on various combinations of USE flags. For example, kdrive will be 
part of xorg-server 1.1. Xgl will likely be part of xorg-server 1.2. 
Already we've got Xdmx, Xnest, Xorg and Xvfb.

Clearly one may desire to install only a certain set of these servers. 
Right now, my working copy has it set up so that USE=minimal in 
combination with USE=(dmx|kdrive|xgl|other group of servers) causes the 
Xorg server to not get built. But expressing that in RDEPEND gets quite 
complex.

Perhaps the "minimal" flag is the wrong way to go, and instead I should 
add a "xorg" flag that defaults on to build the Xorg server. That 
approach would allow for a reasonably simple expression of the driver 
PDEPENDs inside like this: "xorg? ( driver list )".

> Sure, it doesn't help users who have manually emerged some drivers
> without listing them all in $VIDEO_CARDS: they will still be able to
> update their server and keep some old broken drivers behind. But
> hopefully, they won't be so numerous (much less numerous than those who
> would be annoyed by some "!<..." block imho).

A valid problem with this approach. Is requiring everyone to unmerge 
drivers a worse solution than breaking some people who emerged drivers 
directly?

Thanks,
Donnie
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