RFC: Merging X11BASE to LOCALBASE

[michael johnson]

On 7/12/06, Dejan Lesjak <dejan.lesjak at ijs.si> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> There were a couple of debates already concerning /usr/X11R6 as prefix for
> X11
> ports and a bunch of other ports that currently by default install there.
> Quite some people were, when creating a new port that depends on X11,
> wandering whether to put it in X11BASE or LOCALBASE. More than once a
> question of whether the prefix /usr/X11R6 should be just dropped or at
> least
> only retained for core X11 distribution. With the upcoming X.org 7.x ports
> there is perhaps the opportunity to do the prefix merger along that.
> Moving X11 prefix to LOCALBASE would simplify above dilemma. It would be
> also
> more similar to where linux distributions are going (at least Gentoo,
> Debian
> and Fedora deprecated /usr/X11R6 in favour of /usr which, while
> not /usr/local is the location of where all packages install - depending
> on
> X11 or not). If I remember correctly from previous discussions, it would
> be
> more convenient to people with separate mounts for installed packages as
> well. /usr/local is also the default value for --prefix configure option
> for
> X.org packages.
> So it is general intention to go with /usr/local or rather ${LOCALBASE} as
> prefix for X11 ports. If anyone feels that this is horribly wrong, please
> speak up.
>

I agree we should move a lot of software out of X11BASE but there
will need to be a lot of work (esp. for gnome). I'm curious of the
time frame in which xorg 7 will be committed to the tree? I'm not
speaking for the entire freebsd gnome team but if we did decide
to take on this task it would probably take several months to fully
test and get everything working well in LOCALBASE. I think the
major hurdle for us isn't moving everything to LOCALBASE it's
more of the upgrade path people will have to take, having to
rebuild all gnome components and all the bugs that will follow..

Michael


On behalf of x11 team,
> Dejan
>
>
>