Xorg packaging

[Lubos Lunak]

On Wednesday 04 of April 2007, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Lubos Lunak wrote:
> >  What I especially don't get is why there are all those 10k libX*.so
> > libraries like libXdamage.so that all could be simply included in
> > libXext. They're so awfully small that this is IMHO modularization taken
> > a bit too far and I fail to see any advantage in this that'd be worth all
> > the overhead.
>
> That was done in the monolith too, it's not a feature of modularization,

 I meant modularization as a general word, not "x.org modularization". But 
even then I think some things have split move recently (I don't see libXau or 
libXdmcp in 6.8).

> and is done in large part to allow their API/ABI to evolve and change if
> needed without breaking that of other extensions.   If libXft had been
> part of libXext, we'd be carrying both the Xft1 and Xft2 function sets
> around in libXext still, leading to more unnecessary bloat.

 I'm not sure if libXft1's 55k count as bloat. Especially when considering 
that if I took Xau, Xcursor, Xdmcp, Xext, Xfixes, Xft1, Xft2, Xi, Xinerama, 
Xrandr and Xrender libs, they together are about 350k of shared memory, but 
they contribute by 44k of unshared memory per-process, making the plain 
overhead of the split more bloated than the whole functionality together as 
soon as one runs 8 or more apps using them. Which pretty much everybody using 
X does (barring Xft1 and Xi). Not to mention that Xft1 and Xft2 would 
probably share some code. This probably doesn't really count as an argument.

 Anyway, does that mean that you'd be dead set against such changes or you 
could consider it if there would be good reasons?

> (Also, other than composite managers and screenscrapers like VNC, who
>   else links with libXdamage?)

 It was just an example, it was the first ridiculously tiny libX*.so that 
caught my eye and would be probably much better as a PIC libX*.a .

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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