x11 status

Alex Goncharov alex-goncharov at comcast.net
Thu Feb 26 12:10:58 PST 2009


,--- You/Peter (Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:12:25 +1100) ----*
| And along the way, they've dropped things like integration testing,
| avoiding regressions and avoiding POLA violations.

Since I don't care about the new X anymore, I can afford to express my
opinion bluntly: the Xorg we have in ports now is a disaster.

This opinion was arrived to at the cost of more than two weeks undoing
the damage to my systems under the circumstances not conductive for
such activities.
 
| >> latest cvs image from Xfree86, and it built FAR easier that xorg,
| >> faster, far simpler to configure ...
| >
| >Why should it matter how easy it is to build a piece of software? You
| >can just run `make -C /usr/ports/x11/xorg install clean' or `pkg_add -r
| >xorg'.
| 
| Note that Chuck also mentioned faster (the conversion from imake to
| configure added something like 30% to the time to build X.org for
| absolutely no benefit - some pieces of X.org now take 4 times as long
| to configure as to build) and easier to configure.
| 
| Whilst the ease of building a port doesn't really affect the end
| user,

I strongly disagree: a FreeBSD user is almost by definition somebody
who ultimately turns from using built packages to building ports from
source, with options of personal preference.  So, how things are done
build-wise, does affect me, big time.

If the only option to get the contributed (ports) software were using
packages, I'd be using Debian, not FreeBSD.

I have no desire to have HAL on my systems, for example, and FreeBSD
had been giving me the option of not having it -- just build it with
an appropriate option in /etc/make.conf.

And other such things.

Struggling with the Xorg 1.5 unfortunate upgrade, and examining the
ports make files for Xorg/Gnome moved me to the ultimate decision:
don't try to comprehend this mess and stick with something that works.

I rolled back everything x11 to "xorg-server 1.4.2" and have no plans
to upgrade it -- ever, on any of my systems: the old one works,
perhaps not perfectly, but predictably, and why would I need a new
one?

So, for the last month I've been doing weekly rebuilds of ports with
everything upgraded -- other that the /usr/ports/x11* trees, which
will be frozen until I see that other people stop reporting serious
Xorg problems, which may well never happen.

This is a testament to the greatness of the ports system and an
illustration to my claim: building a port does affect the end user.

-- Alex -- alex-goncharov at comcast.net --


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