Xorg version number change

[Daniel Stone]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 03:05:24AM +0200, Roland Mainz wrote:
> Daniel Stone wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 04:52:22PM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> > > What 'the world' means is debatable, especially as many
> > > systems have a lot of paths with 'X11R6' encoded in them.
> > 
> > Just because it's there and common practice, doesn't make it right. :)
> 
> Yep. Long ago it was X11R5, before that X11R4. And switching the default
> dir to /usr/X11R7/ won't hurt neither less or more
> (backwards-compatibility can be guranteed via softlink from /usr/X11R6
> --> /usr/X11R7/ ...) ... :)

So we soft-link all the directories to each other.  That's so cool.
Very compelling argument for having them.

> BTW: Since a while Solaris has a link /usr/X/ which points to the
> currently installed version of X11... maybe the same should be done for
> the Xorg tree and then all version-independent paths should go through
> /usr/X/ (or /usr/X11/) instead of /usr/X11R(6|7)/ ...

Oh man, no.  Why?

For starters, I don't think this tree should even exist.  But if we take
it for granted that it must exist for some strange reason, why must we
include the version number in it?

GTK isn't installed to /usr/gtk+-2.4.

GNOME isn't installed to /usr/gnome2.8.

KDE isn't installed to /usr/kde3.3.

xterm isn't installed to /usr/xterm-0.94.

Apache isn't installed to /usr/apache-1.3.29.

To take the example of a proprietary UNIX suite par excellence; last
time I checked, iPlanet installed to /usr/netscape, not
/usr/netscape-iplanet-x.x.x.  So, even in the most abhorrent case of
there being a separate subdirectory under /usr (why? why? why?), there
is no way known the version number should be playing a part.

I don't think the separate directory under /usr should exist per
default, but if it does, there is absolutely no reason to include the
version number.  I think it's just dumb.  Really, really dumb.

-- 
Daniel Stone                                            <daniel at freedesktop.org>
freedesktop.org: powering your desktop                http://www.freedesktop.org
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