Disable xterm and XRX builds per default / [Fwd: CVS Update: xc (branch: trunk)]

[Jakub Piotr Cłapa]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 09:48:10AM -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
>>What I would like to encourage is for some of the public distributions
>>(like the BSDs, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, etc) to use X.org CVS to maintain
>>their build mechansism for the X.org related packages.  I think that would 
>>improve the quality of those packages while making it clear what parts of 
>>the build are 'standard' X.org and what parts are 'added value'.
> 
> Mmm, I don't like this, if only for one reason: my packages are my packages.  If
> I see 6.8.1-1ubuntu11 there, I know exactly which source they came from, can
> easily find out the build environment they were built on, and can grab the
> canonical binaries.  Likewise any Debian release -- it corresponds to a specific
> version.
> 
> Now, if the user compiles their own stuff, that's great, but I strongly dislike
> the ability to do it under the guise of packaging, which screws up the entire
> mechanism for users and developers alike.  I believe that if you're compiling
> and installing stuff, do just that.  Just don't pretend you're a distribution
> packager.
> 
> I can certainly see usefulness in having all the distributions maintain all
> their patches somewhere public (I have to take at least some responsibility for
> hoarding patches here; however, I'm slowly clearing out everything I have), but
> certainly not the packaging structure.  That crosses the line between upstream
> and distribution stuff.  We maintain upstream stuff upstream, and distributions
> maintain distribution-specific stuff within their distribution.  This is what
> makes sense to me, and why I dislike maintaining distribution-specific packaging
> structures upstream (or: why none of the packages Daniel maintains have debian/
> dirs in the upstream source).

I agree. Maybe there would be some use for ./configure time (I know we 
don't have any ./configure i Xorg but I hope you see the point) message 
informing about places to find packages tuned for your distribution.

It's not a problem for us (PLD) because almost all of our users know 
when to find the newest versions of packages since we have an RPM specs 
CVS repository with very liberal access means (contarary to Debian).
On the other hand from my (several years old) experience with distros 
like MDK or SuSe I recall some difficulties with obtaining new versions 
and I was constantly compiling things from tarballs.

-- 
Regards,
Jakub Piotr Cłapa