[PATCH] build.sh: allow tarballs with --modfile

[Simon Braunschmidt]

On 11/03/2010 07:20 PM, Gaetan Nadon wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 12:21 +0100, Simon Braunschmidt wrote:
>> Would patches to integrate all of build-from-tarballs.sh into build.sh
>> with the purpose to remove build-form-tarballs.sh be accepted?
>>
> Indeed. Last year there was a third script to do the initial "git
> clone". It got integrated into build.sh.
> It's fairly recent, there may be some minor holes in there. I don't
> recall anyone building from tarballs with build.sh
> over the last year.
>
> Out of curiosity, are you downloading the tarballs from the X.Org
> website or from git? Which platform?
>
> Thanks

Platform is a cross-build from usually a 32bit chroot on x86-linux to 
embedded target platforms like i486, i486-nofpu, i686, armv5, ppc. Xorg 
is built as part of the Board Support Packages for embedded systems that 
my company (www.emlix.com) provides.

Our focus it not on developing Xorg, but on reproducibly building it 
from the sources. Therefore we want to rely on tarballs, as using the 
git sources would be an extra maintenance burden.

We usually download tarballs from the X.org website as part of an xorg 
pointrelease, eg 7.3, 7.4, 7.5. If needed, we then upgrade components on 
a case-by-case basis.

We use these tarballs as the basis to build Xorg with our build-system 
e2factory (www.e2factory.org, no advertisement intended, just to explain 
how the process works).

Previously we used to build the invidual components one-by-one, catching 
the build-time dependencies as we discovered them. This approach turned 
out to be pretty hard to maintain.

Now we decided to utilize the util/modular scripts as they are already 
maintained by the community, and to build Xorg in bigger blocks,
eg cross-build host tools, protos, libs, server, few drivers, fonts, few 
apps.

This change was simplified by the recent changes to build.sh, so thanks 
a lot to You and Trevor for this work, it is highly appreciated.

Regards, Gruessle
Simon Braunschmidt