Official protest against bug 1060 / was: Re: Away for a

[Roland Mainz]

mcnichol at austin.ibm.com wrote:
> > From: Jim Gettys <Jim.Gettys at hp.com>
> >
> > Roland,
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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).
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > Others may have other concerns; this one is mine.
> 
> Ok.  So Roland has put a lot of good work into this and would like
> his code in the release. He doesn't like the idea of a separate library, and
> Jim doesn't like an extra dependency on a memory constrained device.

Jim's argumentation with the memory contrained is for /dev/null. We are
talking about a 25KB on x86 and the library is likely loaded by other
libraries or applications anyway.
Just ONE example (beyond the fact that libX11 grew beyond measurement
since X11R6.0 and NOONE complained about that detail yet): Right now far
more space is wasted in libX11 because the code doesn't use |const|
where it would be usefull - the result is a large amount of data
duplication per process instance. And what will happen if more
functionality will be added to libXaw - are now new features judged
based on how many memory they consume ? Then the RENDER and Composite
extensions should be axed, too.

> Another solution could be to add #ifdef's to the changes so that
> the Xaw-XPrint code could easily be compiled out.

That's difficult since this would lead to binary compatibility issues
with libXaw compiled without XawPrintShell vs. applications which expect
the symbols being there.

----

Bye,
Roland

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