Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:09:39 -0400 From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@telenix.org> To: matt donovan <kitchetech@gmail.com> Cc: Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, flz@freebsd.org Subject: Re: why was XFree86 dropped for ports? Message-ID: <49D3CA03.4090208@telenix.org> In-Reply-To: <28283d910903311941g72979cb8k9580ebb503f411eb@mail.gmail.com> References: <49D24F4A.3060900@telenix.org> <20090331222207.GB7661@lonesome.com> <28283d910903311903q76d4a6fdjda6daa35313c5047@mail.gmail.com> <49D2D32D.3020103@telenix.org> <28283d910903311941g72979cb8k9580ebb503f411eb@mail.gmail.com>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I can't justify keeping this is ports any longer, I think it violates the list's rules, no matter how much I like this thread, so I'm moving it to -chat. If you think I'm wrong, I guess it could be moved again. matt donovan wrote: > <snip> > > > > I don't know git anywhere's near as well as I know cvs, but it seems > to me that > xorg doesn't have any TAGS so you can't ask for a particular > release, isn't that > true? I think that is probably a comment on git, not Xorg. I > guess, seeing > that there's about 1/4 the amount of work involved in updating > xFree86 versus > Xorg, I didn't expect that it was a work thing. Finally, I really > don't like > the fact that Xorg comes in all of those little packages, so that > without our > ports system, it might be prohibitively difficult to assemble Xorg. > Like it > would be, I suppose, for KDE. I *like* how you can deal with > XFree86 as one > item. If there was some way to get KDE as one compileable tarball, > that would > be a good thing also. > > <snip> > > Xorg doesn't fully need to be recompiled it was one giant package until > they decided it would be easier for developers to break up the system to > smaller ones. For instance lets say x-server 1.6 came out called xorg > 7.5 well you will only have to recompile x-server really. > > Also I went by Xfree86 webpage which states last stable release is from > December 2008 before that it was Aug. 2007 Actually, seeing as the subdirectories of Xorg aren't linked into any overall Makefile, you usually need to use some shell script, in order to compile Xorg, and I think that's one big reason it takes so long to build. If things can't take advantage of Make's ability to detect date stamps on things and actually reasonably determine what to build and what to skip, then of course it takes longer. I can't really understand why they decided to skip that part of things, even keeping their separate packages. An example of what I mean, if you build all of our ports (I really mean just a subdirectory like maybe devel or graphics) and then decided to issue the "make" again (just the default make, like a make all) and checked the timing, the time for the second run thru would be a tiny fraction of the first run, all because our make detects the presence of things (in our case, cookie files) and does things really faster. I don't see why Xorg would skip this step, it only need them to specifyu the use of a hierarchy, and a top Makefile. Both easy to do. I think they took their breaking things up way too far. I have to say here, probably, that xorg develops things at a way faster rate, I've seen that's true. I haven't yet done a rebuild of the latest XFree86, I wonder if they even have things like compiz ... kde4.2 has convinced me that it's necessary. I guess I just wish that the Xorg folks didn't do such a complete job of breaking things up. I was hoping that someone else, someone who knows git better than I, would validate for me the point, dies git have tags (I saw that Xorg uses git)? Maybe it feeds from my imperfect understanding of git, but it seems to be missing any ability either to tag something as "RELEASE_14", or to ask for a current release from any particular branch. I'm not saying it's this way, I am saying that I'm wondering if it is, cause I couldn't spot anything like it when I looked over the docs. If you know git well enough, could you comment on that? Cause, if it were true, I guess I would consider myself justified in staying away from most git things (I *like* tags and branches, and tracking current). It seems to work really well for Linux, though, but I guess everyone knows about the massive differences in BSD development versus Linux. > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAknTygMACgkQz62J6PPcoOnd7wCggfyrgx2BbiSASrcihoC3x9QO as0An3BRZctScDWi4obKRNgaM7eNrW3H =1Q3u -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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