Development plan -- time to move forward

[Adam Jackson]

On Monday 25 April 2005 11:00, Kevin E Martin wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2005 at 04:38:23PM +0200, Julien Lafon wrote:
> > They *may* be useless if you do not have Xprint clients.
> > xlsatoms is in the app component and xlsprinters and
> > xprehashprinterlist belong there too unless xlsatoms, xlsclients,
> > xlsfonts and so on are put into the X11 library component.
>
> That is not a good argument.  The X11 library is universally used with
> the X Window System -- one can make an argument libX11 is the public
> interface to the X Window System.  On the other hand, Xprint is not
> universally used, and to build xlsprinters and xprehashprinterlist you
> must have libXp available.

Unfortunately libXp is effectively required everywhere.  If you link xdpyinfo 
with Xprint support and then take that binary to a system without libXp, it 
will not run, the linker will refuse.  Every java implementation known to man 
requires libXp as a runtime linker dependency, so if you don't have libXp, 
you don't have java, even if you're not going to print with it.

RedHat does not support Xprint, but they are forced to build libXp anyway.  
Likewise, when Gentoo builds Xorg with USE=-xprint, the client library is 
still installed for binary compatibility.

What a terrible design.

X's extension library mechanism could suck-start a Harley.  We really should 
take a clue from GLX when we deploy XCB en masse, and provide a way to query 
the implementation for required extension functionality.  Until that time, 
every xlib-based extension library is effectively mandatory.

> Also, I would think that you would be happy to have them with libXp,
> since this means that someone who wants the libXp component would also
> get these tools.  However, if you can make an argument that these are
> standalone apps and not just Xprint utilities, then I think we can move
> them back.

Everyone has to have libXp, for the same reason everyone has to have libXext.  
But not everyone has to have xplsprinters.  The Xprint utilities belong in 
xorg/app, not in xorg/lib.

- ajax
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