RFC: Merging X11BASE to LOCALBASE

[Eric Anholt]

On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 23:58 -0700, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> What's the gain? Transition will be a really big PITA for most existing 
> users. Everybody who would be trying to install a KDE/GNOME or even a 
> general X11 port after a switchover still having all X11 bits in 
> /usr/X11R6 is likely to be screwed on build time, due to mismatching 
> includes/libraries search paths. And I am not even telling about 
> run-time problems with datafiles in KDE/GNOME.
> 
> The only way to handle such a merge for ordinary Joe User would be to 
> remove all X11 bits and pieces and compile/install everything from 
> scratch. And despite what X11 maintainers may believe (due to the nature 
> of their position they 
> compile/install/remove/compile/install/remove/.../ad infinite all X11 
> bits and pieces every day), ordinary Joe User doesn't like such gross 
> upgrades, since even with the best packaging system in the world 
> virtually any such upgrade will bring new unanticipated problems to the 
> system that otherwise has been working before upgrade just fine.
> 
> Therefore, I doubt that such "pull the trigger" approach is really going 
> to work in this case. Some more gradual course is in due: with X11R6 
> being banned as a target for a new ports, with new GNOME version moving 
> to the LOCALBASE and so on.

Somehow other distributions have managed to do the transition in a
rather painless way.  I didn't even know that debian had made the
switch, but I dist-upgraded one day and a bit later noticed "oh,
hey, /usr/X11R6 is now a couple of symlinks".

I personally don't see us making this switch without leaving compat
symlinks in for some amount of time either.  I think that would deal
with the "but all my scripts/preferences/etc.!" complaints, while still
giving us the wins of not having to maintain the X11BASE absurdity in
ports and people not having to look in both prefixes to find their
programs when they're setting up firefox prefs, along with all the other
things that we've brought up before.

I think we should be able come up with something to do the transition
without having to recompile all X11BASE ports.  Sure seems to me like
that ought to be doable.

-- 
Eric Anholt                             anholt at FreeBSD.org
eric at anholt.net                         eric.anholt at intel.com
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