Re: Xquartz version change?
Re: Xquartz version change?
- Subject: Re: Xquartz version change?
- From: Ben Byer <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:33:02 -0800
On Dec 4, 2007, at 5:13 PM, Peter O'Gorman wrote:
Martin Costabel wrote:
Peter O'Gorman wrote:
[]
Oh, and can not require any binaries that do not ship with the OS
either. (So pkg-config is out).
It is actually a little weird that pkg-config does not come with the
system (forgotten, perhaps?). There are lots of *.pc files in
/usr/lib/pkgconfig and in /usr/X11/lib/pkgconfig, and there is even a
man page in /usr/X11/man/man1/. Only the executable is missing.
I filed rdar://problem/4704148 about that a year or so ago. I got a
"Thank you for filing enhancement request" and the bug was closed.
Although pkgconfig is required to build X11 (and lots of other
things), we do not ship it with OS X for non-technical reasons that I
don't particularly feel like going into because it was not my decision
to make. (Use your imagination.) The best compromise we could come
up with was leaving the data files around so that programs could use
them, once the user installs pkgconfig.
pkgconfig *is* super-easy to build and/or install from Fink or
MacPorts, so what the Fink people should probably do is accept my
apologies for breaking their scripts, and then
* Check to see if .pc files exist in /usr/X11
* * If so, try to use pkgconfig to get the xorg-server version
* * If that fails, either manually look at /usr/X11/lib/pkgconfig/xorg-
server.pc or install pkgconfig and use it
* Otherwise, fall back on their old method for determining the version.
For the last few releases of X.org, there has been a single person (a
volunteer) responsible for each X11Rx.y release. It was their job to
try to coax everyone to getting their code to a stable point to meet a
target release date; once that was accomplished, it was then a lot of
work simply getting everything in order (packages built and named
correctly, placed in the correct directory hierarchy) so that the
release could be made.
In reality, this meant that you probably spent a good 3-4 months out
of every release cycle waiting on someone to finish their part (or to
get around to packaging up the release); this put a constraint on how
often new releases of the X server could be made, as it's the most
quickly-changing piece.
My involvement with the X.org community more or less started at the
X.org Developer Conference 2006; at that meeting, they decided that
there was little value in the current system, beyond giving people a
nice number to look at. The decision was made to de-emphasize the
"katamari" release number (X11Rx.y) in favor of releasing code as it's
ready. They still do the "releases" for tradition's sake, but for
X11R7.3 that just meant that they picked a date, made sure every
module more or less worked with the other current modules, and threw
up a web page that says "X11R7.3 is the following packages:
Xserver-1.4, libX11-1.1.3, ....". That way, individual components are
free to rev as quickly as they'd like to.
Incidentally, I'm undecided as to what I want to call the next Apple
official release -- X11R7.2 or R7.3. It will be based on Xorg-
server-1.3(-something), which should limit us to calling it R7.2, but
virtually all of the other components meet the definition of 7.3, and
there are no user-visible differences between server-1.3 and
server-1.4 on our platform.
Moral of the story: deprecate the overall release number, focus on
individual module version numbers, and upgrade individual modules as
needed.
--
Ben Byer
CoreOS / BSD Technology Group, XDarwin maintainer
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