Merged proto package

[Keith Packard]

On Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:38:12 +0200, Rémi Cardona <remi at gentoo.org> wrote:

> We (in gentoo) have spent a lot of time trying to figure out which
> protos each app really needs. Now that the split has been done for so
> long, I just don't see the advantage of merging them back.

For distros who have already done the work, the advantage is minimal,
aside from only needing to repackage one thing when changes are made.

The people we're trying to reach with this are those people building
From source.

For people like me, who really can't rely on a distribution to be up to
date enough, I end up installing protocol headers. Of course, they go
stale if I don't keep on top of them, and so I get accidental version
skew. Reducing the number of packages I have to track from 20 to 1 would
avoid this almost entirely.

For people who would like to try out current X server, mesa or driver
bits, we stick them with a huge number of tiny packages to install to
get stuff building. I was working with a hardware validation person just
a few weeks ago; she had a list of some twenty modules required to build
the current Intel driver and X server. 

> Or do we plan to break protos all over again?

No, we keep trying to avoid that. At least we'll catch it sooner if more
people are up-to-date with the protocol headers?

Given that these packages all install only header files and have no
dependencies, it's hard to see the value of breaking them up into
separate packages.

When we did the modularization work, we split things up into the
smallest possible units. For my part, this was probably a habit learned
From working on tiny embedded systems. For libraries and applications, I
think that's a good thing as those things take real space on lots of
machines and can introduce security issues. For header files, I'm having
a hard time seeing the value and I know it's costing the time of a lot
of people who help with the project.

I don't want to merge the whole mess back together again, I think we're
all happy to have the libraries and CLI applications live a separate
life far from our daily activities. However, I do want to encourage
people to develop and test stuff, and when it's reasonable, we should
make that more convenient.

In my ideal world, a user interested in trying out the latest driver
bits for their video card would have to download two modules, the
protocol headers and the X server/drivers. Just merging the protocol
headers together gets us to four -- headers/server/video/evdev. Yeah,
there are also kernel/mesa/libdrm issues, and we should figure out how
to make that easier too.

-- 
keith.packard at intel.com
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