xc/programs considered harmful

[Torrey Lyons]

Unfortunately this topic turned into a debate about the modular vs. 
monolithic tree. I don't have a problem with the modular tree, but I 
and others do have issues with killing the monolithic tree piece meal 
to aid acceptance of the modular tree.

At 6:44 PM +0100 12/17/04, Daniel Stone wrote:
>There's a working server, and working client-side libraries.  And
>working applications, and working fonts.
>
>I honestly don't see what else has to be done; apologies for my lack of
>insight on this matter.

Perhaps this is just a matter of disseminating information. For 
example, as the Mac OS X maintainer, I don't even know if the modular 
tree builds on Mac OS X. The last I heard along these lines was a 
specific request for help in fixing some broken build behavior on Mac 
OS X, which I provided. Is there a clear document somewhere on how to 
build everything I get in the monolithic tree using modular tree 
components? Looking at the various Wiki pages, one quickly gets lost 
in dependencies of which should be built first. With a clean Mac OS X 
system with no X11 components installed I can checkout, build, and 
install the entire X11 distribution by typing three commands. What is 
the equivalent for the modular distribution? Has the modular tree 
been shown to build and run on all platforms supported by X11R6.8.1?

If I had good answers to these questions, I would feel comfortable 
moving my day to day to development to the modular tree. However, I 
imagine many others are in my situation. We can sink some time into 
trying to figure all this out for ourselves about the modular tree, 
or we can just get the coding done that we care about in the tree we 
know works.

--Torrey