Upcoming X.org release and splitting packages

[David Fraser]

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