Re: XFree86 modularization

[Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com>]

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 11:39:38AM -0400, David Dawes wrote: 
> Maybe in the end it's just the philosophical difference between
> those who prefer, say, the FreeBSD approach vs the typical Linux
> approach.  I can go to freebsd.org, check out the FreeBSD CVS, and
> build a complete and well-integrated system from a single command
> line.

I can do that with GNOME too, though. jhbuild will download all
external dependencies, in some cases apply patches, build each,
install, then checkout each GNOME module, build, and install.
It has interactive and non-interactive modes, is aware of intermodule
dependencies, and can build either the whole tree or only single
modules or only some arbitrary subset.

GAR is another system that I haven't used but many people do use. It
claims to be based on the BSD system.

I think the issue is whether maintainers of modules can make releases
and generally work in parallel; that's the gain to be had. Clearly it
hinges on having delegated maintainers for subcomponents. Whether
that's done via Makefile changes or build scripts or whatever is kind
of an implementation detail. But one should be able to bugfix-release
or hack on a small component without having to wrangle the entire
system.

Well, the other gain to be had is whether the coordination and
integration of various packages into a complete usable build is done
on an upstream level or not. For example is "which single version of
freetype and which patches to use and how to nuke the extra versions"
something that's solved out of the box, or something Debian and
FreeBSD and Red Hat and SuSE and Sun each have to sort out for
themselves and get wrong in assorted ways.

Havoc
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