RFC: X library package changes, dependancy changes, freedesktop.org xlibs, etc.

Mike A. Harris mharris at redhat.com
Tue Feb 10 00:09:28 UTC 2004


On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Chris Adams wrote:

>> Unlike the kernel, which doesn't have a stable binary module ABI, 
>> the X server does, so there's no reason why driver modules can't 
>> be packaged separately and updated individually as the need 
>> arises.
>
>How would you actually do this?  For example, if you did this today, all
>the packages would come from the same source RPM.  So, an update to one
>driver would require a rebuild that would bump the release number for
>all packages (and running up2date or yum would want to fetch all the
>updated packages).

Simple.  Install XFree86-sdk rpm, and then you can recompile a 
driver src.rpm.  Paul Nasrat has put the synaptics driver in 
fedora.us together, and did up some individual driver rpm files 
as proof of concept.  It is rather trivial stuff really.  ;o)


>Or will you break up the XFree86 source tree into separate drivers?

Who says the drivers will be from XFree86 source?  ;o)  Maybe 
they will, maybe they wont.  There are lots of places drivers can 
come from.

http://gatos.sf.net
http://dri.sf.net
http://people.redhat.com/alan
etc.
etc.
etc.


>Will that work?

Yes, it works now.


>Last time I built XFree86, which was a long time ago, there were
>a lot of inter-dependencies, so building just one thing was
>non-trivial.

Depends on what exactly you're trying to build really.  For 
drivers, you need the sdk installed.


>Isn't this the way XFree86 3.x releases were packaged (i.e. a bunch of
>hardware-specific packages all with the same version-release built from
>the same source RPM)?

Nope.


>Unless you break up the source (so XFree86-ATI-1.2.3-5.i686.rpm
>and XFree86-nVidia-0.1-1.i386.rpm can exist and be built from
>separate .src.rpm packages), I don't see this as being a big
>win.

That is exactly the plan Stan.  ;o)

That is the simple side of things though.  I could spend probably 
3-4 hours and do all of this by tomorrow.  There's a lot of other 
goodies that can be done too, but for it to be totally user 
friendly some work in other areas needs to come first.  Separate 
driver rpms overnight, would be useful for people to use, but 
wouldn't integrate quite perfectly without changes to other 
things too.

I've got plans for those "other things" however, but they haven't 
left the drawing board yet.  That will come in time.


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat





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