x.org is Hacker Trash

[Daniel Stone]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 09:54:21AM +0200, Pavel Troller wrote:
>   To clarify my position:
>   I'm the "Distribution Packager".
>   I have my own, private distribution, established in 1994. It is _NOT_ based
> on any current publicly known distro. I cannot reuse any of official packages
> for any distro - and what's the most important, i DON'T WANT it. I have my own
> ways to compile, install, etc.
>   So, I believe that +++I Am The Target Customer For X.org+++.

More or less, yes.

>   I'm successfully compiling all the Linux stuff starting with kernel, over
> glibc, gcc suite etc. etc., ending with beasts like KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice etc,
> which are even bigger and more complex than X.Org.

Why?

>   Yes, I CAN build X.org. 
>   Currently I'm running an x server from git master, xf86-video-intel-1.9.93,
> most of the X libs are also from git master.
>   But I wanted to build an official release, say, 7.2.0.
>   I failed. I didn't find anywhere, which particular versions of various
> components must be put together to make it working. It can be compiled, but
> it doesn't work then.

http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/X11R7.2/src/
http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/Releases/ModuleVersions

>   And when I have the git repo fully downloaded, do you want me to download
> all the official 7.2 tarballs too ? I refuse. It should be possible to build
> every release, every tag, using one git repo. It's the main goal of git, to
> allow this. Or am I wrong ?

You can use the ModuleVersions stuff to work out which tags you need for
which module, yes.  But no, it's not the goal of git to allow people to
build specific versions of module sets.  It's possible, but personally I
think the whole distributed revision control that makes merging trivial
thing is slightly more important.

>   Would be something similar possible with X.org ? A simple script, which
> just adjusts the git trees of X.org components to match them together.

Why would you want to download the entire git repositories of every
single module, and then only use that to build one single version?  You
seem to be quite keen on making this hard for yourself.

But yes, it would be possible.  I guess the reason no-one's written it
reflects a lack of popular demand.

>   My nature is to be calm, not to write such a mails, however, from my point
> of view, building X.org is one of the most complex tasks for a Linux 
> distribution packager, probably the most complex one. 

It is relatively complex, and in some cases (e.g. the apps)
unnecessarily so.  But the thing to realise is that most of the modules
haven't changed in about a decade.  It's quite painful initially, but
then you cheerfully get to ignore half the proto modules and libraries,
and all the fonts.

Cheers,
Daniel
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