Attn: Maintainers of things which might depend on xorg-x11-xkbdata

Mike A. Harris mharris at mharris.ca
Tue Jul 11 22:06:45 UTC 2006


Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> On 7/8/06, Mike A. Harris <mharris at mharris.ca> wrote:
>> Note that similar strategy is used throughout all of the
>> X.Org modular packaging, and packagers should always use
>> a virtual dependency on modular X items if one exists
>> already (ie: xdm, xfs, Xorg, Xnest, Xvfb, individual
>> binaries present in various apps/utils packages, etc.).
>> This helps to futureproof everything as much as possible,
>> and while in a perfect world the packaging of things
>> shouldn't really change much, nobody's planned on it
>> changing and it has changed 4-5 times over the last
>> 2-3 years, so using virtual provides/requires for this
>> stuff now, helps to save everyone headaches in the
>> future.
> 
> So, for example, right now I need to add a BR for the file
> /usr/include/X11/StringDefs.h

No.

If one re-reads what I said above, you'll notice that I specified
'individual binaries', as in binary executables stored in
/usr/bin.  For example, if for whatever reason some package
absolutely needs to execute "Xnest", it should have:

Requires: Xnest

and *NOT*

Requires: xorg-x11-server-Xnest

By depending on the virtual "Xnest", it ensures that if the
packaging of Xorg changes again in the future - as it has 2-3
times in the last 2-3 years, your package will survive the
packaging migration without needing any dependency updates,
as we will ensure that any new package that contains Xnest,
also has a "Provides: Xnest" in it.

Ditto for various other _binary_executables_, such as xdm,
xfs, Xorg, mkfontscale, mkfontdir, etc.

As far as any header files or other development files are
concerned, you _must_ individually require each individual
libXXXXXX-devel package that your software needs to compile
and link.

> what BR: line should I use?

$ rpm -qf /usr/include/X11/StringDefs.h
libXt-devel-1.0.0-2

so:

BuildRequires: libXt-devel



-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.




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