Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:13:46 -0400 From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@telenix.org> To: flz@freebsd.org, ports@freebsd.org Subject: why was XFree86 dropped for ports? Message-ID: <49D24F4A.3060900@telenix.org>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I cc'd flz because I saw an email from March of 2008 which announces that Florent Thoumie (flz) himself deleted the XFree86-4 port. I need to understand why all support for XFree86 has been removed from our ports. It doesn't make sense to me. Here are the salient points I've seen, from doing my own experimentation with it about 2 months ago: 1) it builds in about 1/3 of the time of the Xorg offering. 2) It's still being developed, and having regular releases. 3) it configures trivially easy, most especially relative to Xorg. 4) it's a single port that downloads as one tarball, as opposed to Xorg, which is composed of about a hundred different tarballs. It's not possible to handle the Xorg port as one item, so that makes XFree86 far simpler to maintain that Xorg. 5) The configuration process for XFree86 is still what it has been for decades, and you need only change one single variable in one of their configuration files to get it to respect PREFIX. I actually built Xfree86 by changing that one single variable, so that it installed where I wanted (I favor /usr/X11R7), and it needed not a single additional change to get it to begin compiling. No errors in the build, it finished in a small fraction of the time that Xorg takes. Seeing as it doesn't seem to have any obvious drawbacks, I assume that there has to be some political failing. Can't be license, because ports as it stands now includes a huge array of different licenses, including some commercial ones, so having the license not be exactly the same as the BSD license can't be it, could it? I'm not making any argument at all comparing Xorg to XFree86 in terms of quality or development rate, only that I can't see any reason why the ports should have been removed, because XFree86 is clearly something that some folks would want, and it's a trivially easy port. I tried Googling this, but just couldn't find the reasoning that justified removing XFree86 from our ports. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAknST0oACgkQz62J6PPcoOk8hwCcCRg/C+jMhH4tbgtJFxYO5qHk 2pAAnjHteJ/sgFRh4rmCa9CDRiVP6i8l =L9W9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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