Building Xorg 7.1 from tarballs

[R.L. Horn]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2006, Andrew Haninger wrote:

> When I've tried to build X.org 7.0 on a fresh machine, it dies 
> complaining that it needs Mesa installed. When I've tried to build Mesa, 
> it dies complaining that it needs X installed.

I _think_ you can build from scratch by carefully watching the 
dependencies.  First merge the R7.0 and R7.1 source trees.  Build and 
install everything up to the server (except xdriinfo), build the server 
against Mesa sources (6.5 for the R7.1 server) and install.  Finally, 
finish off with the remaining packages.

Now, you should be able to build and install the Mesa libraries (I used 
6.5.1).  In a bizarre twist, the Mesa build requires makedepend -- which, 
apparently, is used mainly to produce annoyingly irrelevant warning 
messages -- so you need Imake.

Once Mesa is installed, build and install xdriinfo.

Q.E.F., YMMV, TANSTAAFL, usw.

You _might_ have to build and install a non-GL server and have a complete 
kit before doing anything with Mesa.

You _might_ have to do a software-only Mesa build somewhere along the way.

> One "solution" I found was to start the X.org 7.0 build, let it die, 
> install it anyway, build Mesa successfully, install it, and then rebuild 
> X.org 7.0. This seems completely rediculous to me.

I've seen worse.  In particular, I imagine that there's a special circle 
of Hell reserved for developers who come up with compilers that can only 
be built using a recent version of the same compiler. :-)