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Re: Upcoming X.org release and splitting packages
- From: David Fraser <davidf at sjsoft dot com>
- To: cygwin-xfree at cygwin dot com
- Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 07:17:16 +0200
- Subject: Re: Upcoming X.org release and splitting packages
- References: <40590A04.1090101@codeweavers.com>
- Reply-to: cygwin-xfree at cygwin dot com
Harold L Hunt II wrote:
We will soon (possibly next week) be releasing a new version of all
Cygwin/X packages built from the source code tree managed by X.org and
hosted on freedesktop.org. This will be a very good thing since all of
the Cygwin/X developers will be able to stay in sync with the exact
code that is in distribution via CVS, compared to our current system
today where the code in distribution has many differences from that in
CVS. The rebuild won't mean much to end users: all libraries remain
binary compatible with the current packages and the contents of the
release (programs, etc.) will be almost identical.
In case you have not noticed, I created a build and packaging script
system for Cygwin/X last week (took 60+ hours). This script system
does a few things for us, such as allowing us to easily distribute
source tarballs via Cygwin's setup.exe. More importantly, the script
system allows us to exercise a finer control over what files each
package contains and how many packages we break the distribution up
into. We can very easily rename current packages when we make the next
release, we can split existing packages into pieces, or we could take
a set of packages, roll them back together, then split that entire
mess into mixed pieces of the originals.
I am mentioning this now because I can think of a few things that I
would like to change in our package layout in time for the X.org
release, but I would also like to get feedback from the community on
what you think would be useful. Please take a look at my brief list of
ideas below and send your thoughts to the mailing list if you have
something about our packaging that you have wanted changed for a long
time.
My Proposals for Packaging Changes
==================================
1) Due to popular demand, rename the "prog" package to "devel". The
name "devel" matches the defacto standard used by other packages for
link libraries and header files; most people have no idea what the
"prog" package is for, but they do know what a "devel" package is for.
+1
2) Split the "bin" package into at least a few pieces (but not too
many pieces):
2a) "bin-dlls" will contain the .dll files only. This would allow
packages like emacs or xemacs to depend only on bin-dlls instead of on
the entire bin package which includes programs not used by emacs nor
xemacs.
2b) "bin-lndir" would contain the lndir utility. lndir has no
dependence on X libs and can be used by any programmer for non-X
projects.
2c) "bin-apps" would contain all other applications originally
contained in "bin" but not contained in "bin-dlls" nor "bin-lndir".
This sounds great... although I wonder whether it would be good to split
bin-apps into bin-apps (xterm, xeyes, etc) and bin-utils (xauth, xhost etc)
3) Rename all fonts packages from "f100, cyr, fenc, fnts, fscl" to
something like "fonts-100dpi", "fonts-cyrillic", "fonts-encodings",
"fonts-75dpi", and "fonts-scalable".
+1
4) Split the "fnts" package into a "fonts-required" and "fonts-75dpi".
fonts-required should be a very small package that would allow people
to minimize their download if they are using Xdmcp to reach a KDE or
Gnome desktop, both of which you client-rendered fonts (few fonts
required on your Cygwin/X host in that case).
+1
5) Rename the "lib" package to something more meaningful. The name
currently implies that it might contain link libraries or run-time
libraries, but it really contains files shared among X packages.
Perhaps "shared-files" would be a better name. I would appreciate it
if someone would look into what Debian and/or Fedora call this package.
Fedora has all the /usr/X11R6/lib/locale/ files,
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XErrorDB and
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB in XFree86-libs-data, the
/usr/X11R6/include/X11/bitmaps/ files in XFree86-devel, and on my system
doesn't have /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xedit/lisp/ files so I can't say.
So I guess libs-data is a good name...
6) Rename "fsrv" to "font-server".
+1
7) Rename "html" to "manual-pages-html".
8) Rename "man" to "manual-pages".
what about docs and docs-html for these too?
Let us know what you think of those and send in your own suggestions
as well.
Harold
Just some ideas
David