100s of xorg ports, will there be an xorg-base port?

[Evren Yurtesen]

To summarize shortly, I believe the solution is to provide selection 
dialogs where the user can select which xorg drivers/apps etc. he/she 
wants to install and which he doesnt. Similar to phpX-extensions.

Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On 2007-Jul-06 23:37:32 +0300, Evren Yurtesen <yurtesen at ispro.net> wrote:
>> I think it would be nice if you could make an xorg-base port which will have 
>> the minimal ports installed.
> 
> Please define "minimal ports installed".  Does you want an X server?  If
> so, which of the 25 input and 35 video drivers should be included?  Maybe
> it's reasonable to just include keyboard and mouse input drivers but the
> video driver you need depends on your hardware.

For example when one installs PHP he/she has possibility to select which 
extensions to install or not, using a dialog. There could be a selection 
list for keyboard, mouse and video drivers where the user can list the 
drivers he/she needs/wants. Now there is no way to select what to 
install and what to not to install. Considering that most people has 
keyboard and mouse only these two can be selected by default (where the 
user can select more if he/she need.)

About video drivers, I havent seen trident, s3, s3virge, sis... etc. in 
long long time. Long story short the most common used ones are nvidia 
and ati cards along with intel's onboard chips. So some most common used 
video drivers can be selected by default. Actually, there could be a 
possibility to represent auto selected items based on based on display 
vendor IDs of detected devices.

> How about fonts?  You have a choice of >100 packages, how do you select
> which ones should be included.

Similar to drivers there could be a selection dialog for fonts. I didnt 
go through the fonts yet so I am not so sure about what is required and 
what is not but if there was at least a selection dialog this would help 
a lot.

> Do you want X clients?  Which ones?
> What X extensions are you going to need?

A selection dialog with the basic idea of needed selecter, more can be 
selected if wanted.

> If you believe that an xorg-base port with some arbitrary set of ports
> is worthwhile, you are welcome to create and submit it.

I will try to look into this.

>> Most of the programs like xeyes etc. are not needed,
> 
> How do you define "not needed"?  Just because you don't use xeyes
> doesn't mean someone else doesn't.

Perhaps I should rephrase. "Not required for getting X11 to initialize."

>> it is ridiculous to install a port for each!
> 
> The X.org project decided to modularize xorg.  Obviously, this means that
> there will be lots of small ports instead of a few very large ports.  A
> fairly obvious side-effect is that people will need to install more ports
> than they used to.
> 
>> Plus, most people are not happy to add ~400 more ports to their FreeBSD 
>> boxes.
> 
> Please explain what the problem is.  If you choose to install the xorg
> metaport then the ports system will automatically fetch and install the
> dependencies.  Exactly what aren't "most people" happy about?

I guess it is mostly psychological but people do not tend to like a lot 
of ports installed with each app as usually this means more difficulties 
when upgrading etc. Maybe this is superficial but at the least it is 
discouraging people from using X with FreeBSD or upgrading to 7.2. 
People are not happy because of the simple reason that one has to 
install 300-400 more ports (especially without a possibilit to select 
what to not to install) to get X running nowadays.

>> I even read that somebody is planning to change to Linux because of 
>> this mess.
> 
> Where they will wind up with exactly the same problem because Linux
> uses the same X server.  And, unless their distro includes the
> equivalent to the FreeBSD meta-ports, they will actually had a much
> harder time as they try to work out which of the >1000 X-related
> packages they need to install to wind up with a working X system.

Might be so, but if you google around a little bit you will not see 
anybody saying it is easier to upgrade it on FreeBSD, as well, there are 
people saying otherwise. Whatever the reason is, this is bad publicity 
for FreeBSD.

>> When we install all anyhow, makes no sense at all.
> 
> No-one is forcing you to install it all.  If you choose to install the
> xorg metaport then you wind up with all of X.org - as in the past.
> The difference is that you now have the choice of only installing just
> the bits you want - which can significantly reduce the size of your
> X installation.
> 

It is not practical to manually install only the parts we want to.

Thanks,
Evren