[RFC][PATCH 0/6] towards the dietary: removing libpciaccess dependency from Xorg

[Mark Kettenis]

> Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:43:10 +0300
> From: "Vignatti Tiago (Nokia-D/Helsinki)" <tiago.vignatti at nokia.com>
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 07:23:38PM +0200, ext Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> > Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> > > A lot of documentation and people start with "Run Xorg
> > > -configure to generate a dummy config file when you need to
> > > manually edit one"
> 
> IMHO this argument doesn't justifies to let the dumb generator of xorg.conf,
> i.e, the -configure option. 
> 
> Users ("people") don't need know how to configure or even know about the
> existence of the xorg.conf. The distribution or some fancy GUI application
> must to do it for them.

Sorry but there are people that prefer to configure their system by
editing configuration files directly.  On OpenBSD that's basically
your only option if you don't want to install a shitload of packages.
We do try very hard to make X work without an xorg.conf out of the
box, but we're never going to ship a fancy GUI to configure X in the
base system (unless it is part of Xorg and doesn't need a shitload of
dependencies).

By the way, how am I going to use a fancy GUI application if I don't
have a working X server?

> > And even if none of Tiago's patches land as-is, it would be very nice to
> > just have -configure dump the same stub config file that gets logged into
> > Xorg.0.log already as the autogenerated stub instead of having a second
> > code path that generates something different, including sometimes picking
> > different drivers, so that Xorg -configure really does give you the same
> > starting point as Xorg with no xorg.conf.
> 
> It is _not_ the X server's role to dump this. Period.

I actually think Adam has a very good point here.  The autogenerated
stub could be a reasonable starting point for people that want to
create their own xorg.conf by hand, and it would be more consistent
than what's generated by the -configure option.

I'm not sure this needs to be part of the X server, but it should use
the same code as the X server.  Otherwise things are bound to get
inconsistent.  So it might as well live in the X server itself.