Installing Xorg

[Michel Dänzer]

On Wed, 2006-02-22 at 09:02 -0800, Ian Romanick wrote:
> 
> Felix Kühling wrote:
> 
> > <rant>
> > Even though i have not been whining, I find the modular build process
> > rather painful. You may have noticed that the number of active
> > developers is rather small too. FWIW, whenever I tried the modular build
> > it was broken and needed a fix somewhere. What I'm waiting for is for
> > the modular Xorg to hit major distributions so that people can build
> > individual modules without building everything else. Until that time
> > modular Xorg is just a PITA for anyone willing to help with Xorg
> > development with limited time at their hands.
> > </rant>

Modular packages are in Ubuntu dapper and starting to appear in Debian
experimental... they basically work fine for building stuff from CVS on
a sid machine here[1].

Even without that, I'm not convinced the situation is really worse than
it was with the monolith...

Last but not least, jhbuild is a nice tool to facilitate rebuilding
everything without installing anything to system directories.


> I second that.  I'd also like to add that, even with distcc and three
> systems, the modular build takes at least an order of magnitude longer
> to complete than the monolith.

As Felix pointed out above, the point is that you usually won't *need*
to build anything but what you're working on. Of course, it's taking a
little while yet until we're there, but I have no doubt that the result
will be much better both for gurus and newbies than the monolith.


[1] As I pointed out before, the biggest gotcha right now is that the
modular x11-common needs to be installed before any modular -dev
package.

-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer      |     Debian (powerpc), X and DRI developer
Libre software enthusiast    |   http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer