Xorg version number change

[Ely Levy]

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004, Daniel Stone wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 03:05:24AM +0200, Roland Mainz wrote:
> > Daniel Stone wrote:
> > > On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 04:52:22PM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> > > > What 'the world' means is debatable, especially as many
> > > > systems have a lot of paths with 'X11R6' encoded in them.
> > >
> > > Just because it's there and common practice, doesn't make it right. :)
> >
> > Yep. Long ago it was X11R5, before that X11R4. And switching the default
> > dir to /usr/X11R7/ won't hurt neither less or more
> > (backwards-compatibility can be guranteed via softlink from /usr/X11R6
> > --> /usr/X11R7/ ...) ... :)
>
> So we soft-link all the directories to each other.  That's so cool.
> Very compelling argument for having them.
>
> > BTW: Since a while Solaris has a link /usr/X/ which points to the
> > currently installed version of X11... maybe the same should be done for
> > the Xorg tree and then all version-independent paths should go through
> > /usr/X/ (or /usr/X11/) instead of /usr/X11R(6|7)/ ...
>
> Oh man, no.  Why?
>
> For starters, I don't think this tree should even exist.  But if we take
> it for granted that it must exist for some strange reason, why must we
> include the version number in it?
>
> GTK isn't installed to /usr/gtk+-2.4.
>
> GNOME isn't installed to /usr/gnome2.8.
>
> KDE isn't installed to /usr/kde3.3.
>
> xterm isn't installed to /usr/xterm-0.94.
>
> Apache isn't installed to /usr/apache-1.3.29.
>
> To take the example of a proprietary UNIX suite par excellence; last
> time I checked, iPlanet installed to /usr/netscape, not
> /usr/netscape-iplanet-x.x.x.  So, even in the most abhorrent case of
> there being a separate subdirectory under /usr (why? why? why?), there
> is no way known the version number should be playing a part.
>
> I don't think the separate directory under /usr should exist per
> default, but if it does, there is absolutely no reason to include the
> version number.  I think it's just dumb.  Really, really dumb.

I agree,
Maybe X was concidered a big package in the past so it was smart to give
it its own directory but now kde/gnome are as big,
I think we should install like everyone else in /usr/local by default,
If someone wants /usr/local/X11/ go ahead change the host.def...

Ely