Modularization mailing list and initial strawman proposal

[Adam Jackson]

On Saturday 26 March 2005 02:53, Egbert Eich wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.  Though this also argues for smaller, more focused releases in the 
future.

- ajax
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