RFC: Merging X11BASE to LOCALBASE

[Brooks Davis]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 12:33:22PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> Dejan Lesjak wrote:
> > On Friday 14 July 2006 08:58, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> >> What's the gain? 
> > 
> > I believe I mentioned some of gains in first mail. There is also the benefit 
> > of less divergence to upstreams as ./configure scripts of various ports 
> > use /usr/local as default prefix, but more importantly as modular X.org is 
> > becoming more widespread there is tendency of various packagers (for example 
> > Linux distributions already mentioned) to install all packages under same 
> > prefix. We expect that if we follow that trend, we would make maintainers and 
> > users' lives a bit easier in the long run.
> 
> Note, I am still making up my mind about whether what you're proposing is a
> good idea or not, so I'm not intending this as a criticism. However, the
> argument you propose above as a benefit for the move is completely specious.
> Our ports are supposed to be prefix-clean no matter what the defaults in the
> distributed software are, and no matter what prefix the user chooses. Thus
> (other than ports which are broken now which need fixing anyway), the only
> thing this move will do is ADD work for maintainers (at least in the short
> run), it will not make anyone's life easier in this area.
> 
> I would also like to reinforce Maxim's point here, since I think it's
> getting lost in the shuffle. The burden to the users is NOT just
> reinstalling, which with modern tools like portmaster or portupgrade should
> be pretty painless, if not time consuming. There is also the burden to our
> users of editing config files, firefox app preferences, etc. etc. Some of
> these can be handled automatically by the ports, many of them cannot.

Assuming we deal with all the conflicting ports in the first round
I don't fully buy this argument.  If most people can simply upgrade
the ports in question then "rm -rf /usr/X11RC && ln -s /usr/local
/usr/X11R6" will take care of config files.  That's admittedly a large
assumption, but I don't think it's all that unreasonable.

I think the argument for this change is that the use of X11BASE is
pretty much random so it's no longer serving any useful purpose and the
lack of consistency is a minor negative since you never know where an X
related port will end up without reading the Makefile.

-- Brooks
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