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Date:      Sun, 09 Nov 2003 01:53:48 -0800
From:      Eric Anholt <eta@lclark.edu>
To:        ports@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   HEADSUP: XFree86 changes
Message-ID:  <1068371628.1989.12.camel@leguin>

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XFree86 4.4 will be coming out in the not-so-distant future, and I'm
planning on making some changes to the XFree86 ports to reduce the pain
associated with upgrading and maintaining XFree86.

I'm going to be moving our XFree86 over to using separate ports of the
X11 libraries from freedesktop.org (fd.o) rather than XFree86.  This
will reduce the recompiling time for rebuilding things after an upgrade
of a single part, and I also expect the freedesktop.org libraries to
stay better maintained and release more frequently than XFree86's. 
XFree86-4-libraries will continue to exist, because it will still have
some libraries not offered from fd.o.

As part of this, I'll be converting the X Servers to use the (new, in
some cases) shared libraries rather than each linking against static
libraries built during the build of that server.

I'll add the new fd.o xlibs ports with myself as the maintainer, but
it's just so somebody gets the PRs assigned to them and hears
complaints.  If anyone else wanted to join in or take over, I would be
very excited.  Especially since I'll be gone from Jan 30 - May 4 of
2004, and FreeBSD will probably want a maintainer during that time. 
(Perhaps there would be an x11@FreeBSD.org like gnome@FreeBSD.org)

As a result of the shuffling around of ports that provide different
files, I expect there to be frequent pains when people use portupgrade. 
I really wish we could get pkg_deinstall (or does portupgrade do
deinstalling on its own?) to not remove a file from the filesystem while
a package still referenced it.

Also, I'm planning on removing support for LBX.  It complicates the
build process, and users are equally well or better served using ssh
with X forwarding and compression according to LBX's author.  Speak up
now, or it will be going soon.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                eta@lclark.edu          
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/         anholt@FreeBSD.org



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