why was XFree86 dropped for ports?

[Robert Noland]

On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 22:36 -0400, Chuck Robey wrote:
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> matt donovan wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com
> > <mailto:linimon at lonesome.com>> wrote:
> > 
> >     On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 01:13:46PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote:
> >     > I need to understand why all support for XFree86 has been removed from
> >     > our ports.
> > 
> >     Because no one volunteered to do the work to support it.
> > 
> >     At any given time there are at least a couple of dozen X11-related PRs
> >     outstanding, and more questions posted to various mailing lists.  A lot
> >     of them are of the form "I can't get X version foo to work with my XYZ
> >     card."  Without anyone willing to work on such things, there was no
> >     reason to keep doing the extra work to support the parallel set of
> >     infrastructure.  (Removing the code to be able to pick one or the other
> >     greatly simplified bsd.*.mk, for instance.)
> > 
> >     It's simply a question of how many hours of work people want to put in,
> >     much like any other FreeBSD ports.
> > 
> 
> > 
> > Also many programs compile only with Xorg now. Well without patches of
> > course. The small programs anyways. also Xfree86 does not have regular
> > updates either from what I can see December 28, 2008 is their last one.
> > Xorg gets updated roughly every month since they became modular. but yes
> > the main reason is no one to maintain it.
> 
> I don't know git anywhere's near as well as I know cvs, but it seems to me that
> xorg doesn't have any TAGS so you can't ask for a particular release, isn't that
> true?  I think that is probably a comment on git, not Xorg.  I guess, seeing
> that there's about 1/4 the amount of work involved in updating xFree86 versus
> Xorg, I didn't expect that it was a work thing.  Finally, I really don't like
> the fact that Xorg comes in all of those little packages, so that without our
> ports system, it might be prohibitively difficult to assemble Xorg.  Like it
> would be, I suppose, for KDE.  I *like* how you can deal with XFree86 as one
> item.  If there was some way to get KDE as one compileable tarball, that would
> be a good thing also.
> 
> I recently got kde4.2 working on my home box, and all the neat eye candy things
> that are added, I'll have to see, maybe you're right, XFree86 might not work
> with KDE, but saying that XFree86 hasn't had an update since December makes no
> sense to me, versus the fact that I *think* git allows no release tags, so I
> think one could argue that there are no Xorg releases at all.  That, or I don't
> know git well enough, either is possible.  If there are tags in git, I will go
> back and reread the git docs until I find them.

git has tags and branches, all of which can be checked out from fd.o.
AFAIK, things aren't tagged for "Xorg releases", but all of the packages
carry tags and some have release branches.

robert.

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-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD
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