Re: XFree86 modularization

[David Dawes <dawes@XFree86.Org>]

On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 09:25:39PM -0700, Torrey T. Lyons wrote:
>At 11:47 PM -0400 5/8/03, Owen Taylor wrote:
>>Hi Egbert,
>>
>>Here's a quick (if late) writeup of my thoughts on X modularization;
>>I'm not sure it really addresses your questions, since the
>>driver interfaces are the part of X that I'm least familiar
>>with, but perhaps it is useful anyways.
>>
>>  * One thing I personally would to like to see split apart, or in
>>    fact, killed from XFree86 is copies of libraries that are
>>    independently maintained ... FreeType, zlib, expat, and now
>>    fontconfig. People whine about external dependencies, but in
>>    the end sucked in copies of the libraries do more harm both
>>    maintenance headaches and in multiple conflicting installs.
>
>Here's a counter example: In recent history this would have caused 
>great difficulties on Darwin/Mac OS X with Freetype. Freetype is 
>largely only installed on Mac OS X as part of XFree86. Although 
>Freetype supports Mac OS X, the Freetype team has no committers with 
>a Mac OS X box. Until a few days ago you could not even build 
>standard Freetype on Mac OS X using gcc but had to use a proprietary 
>compiler. I do not mean to pick on the Freetype team--they do a great 
>job. Freetype has just had a different emphasis with regards to which 
>platforms they support. However, whenever XFree86 depends on an 
>external library that may not have the same level of support for all 
>the platforms XFree86 supports, you need to have XFree86 maintain a 
>local copy of the library.

As well as making sure that significant external dependencies are
available in a sufficiently portable form to be useful for a product
that spans as many platforms as XFree86 does, it's also important that
such dependencies be available under licenses that are XFree86-compatible.
Having them within the XFree86 source tree is an effective way of
achieving all of this, as well as making it easy for a complete XFree86
to be built without having to track a moving target of external
dependencies.

Most of this is irrelevant to the Linux target audience.  That doesn't
mean that it is irrelevant to XFree86's audience.

As for the argument about having multiple versions of things like freetype
installed, XFree86 can be configured to build and use externally supplied
version of externally maintained dependencies like freetype, so that is
really a non-issue.  The approach XFree86 has taken on this provides
workable solutions for all of its user base, not just today's largest
subset.

David
-- 
David Dawes
Founder/committer/developer                     The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes
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