Modularization mailing list and initial strawman proposal

[Egbert Eich]

Adam Jackson writes:
 > How many imake options do we have?  Quantity of options is not the issue.  
 > Sensible defaults is the issue.
 > 
 > We will have many fewer options per package than we currently have with imake, 
 > because each package will be smaller and thus won't have the full set of 
 > compile-time flags.  But autoconf really does make this easy, by ignoring 
 > flags it doesn't know about.  So you can do something like:
 > 

There is a deeper problem hidden behind this:
 we will have to face a problem that doesn't exist presently: 
diverging names of options that do the same thing in different 
packages.
There is nothing worse than needing to set option '--foo' on package
a but option '--bar' on package b to do exactly the same thing.
Furthermore it makes the entire X.Org software set look inconsitent.
To reduce the risc of this we should have an option registry and
someone to keep track of option names.
Furthermore we should have the policy that packages that are shipped
in an official X.Org release should adhere to a certain set of rules.
Using registered options to set a certain well known config switch
and registering new options should be among them.

Egbert.