Official protest against bug 1060 / was: Re: Away for afewdays...

[Roland Mainz]

Jim Gettys wrote:
> To begin with, I'm sorry we were not aware of the situation
> earlier, and we need to work out a process so that this can get
> handled sooner.
> 
> The large issue in my mind (personally) is the introduction of a new
> significant size library dependency into Xaw, without the provision
> to make it optional in the build.

The library dependicy is NOT significant, neither on x86, ARM nor on
SPARC. The libXp.so library is very small and adds no compliciated
dependicies. And the interface is stable since at least X11R6.4. How
many years are that... ten ?

> Some of us work on footprint sensitive devices where adding
> more code isn't a viable option. (nor do we have printers anywhere
> nearby our iPAQ's).

Erm... remember that the server side of Xprint is just a simple Xserver
?
Two years ago we demonstrated at the University Giessen that Xprint is
VERY well suited for PDAs since all memory intensive stuff is done on
the server side - which can be accessed via _remote_ X11 on a seperate
machine.

> I personally don't want to have to have an Xmu/Xmuu situation
> have to develop for the library, to avoid picking up the depencency,
> to recover space we literally don't have.

We are talking about less than 25KB of code on x86, on ARM Thumb it's
even smaller. There are bigger things to complain about than a
self-contained X11 extension library which has no other dependicies than
libc, libX11 and libXext (which are always loaded anyway).
And libXp.so is likely loaded anyway by other applications, too. You are
worrying about the wrong things. Or at least about the wrong library:
Between X11R6.0 and X11R6.7 libX11 grew by a few _hundred_ kilobytes.
libXp.so is only a fraction of one _hundred_ kilobyte.
 
> So some of us would have to do additional work to remove the
> dependency; I believe that it is incumbent on you, the person adding
> functionality, to make it possible to build without the requirement
> of picking up the dependency.

What about turning off the building of libXaw-based applications then ?

----

Bye,
Roland

-- 
  __ .  . __
 (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org
  \__\/\/__/  MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer
  /O /==\ O\  TEL +49 641 7950090
 (;O/ \/ \O;)