Improving Xorg

[Barry Scott]

Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Thursday 29 June 2006 11:00, Barry Scott wrote:
>   
>> Jesse Barnes wrote:
>>     
>>> What exactly are you trying to do?  Are you a distributor who's trying to
>>> package stuff up for users with less granularity than the upstream X.Org
>>> provides?  Or just someone who wants to tinker around with recent X bits
>>> every now and then?
>>>
>>> I've heard a few people say they miss the "make World" approach but
>>> haven't seen anyone say *why* they miss it...
>>>       
>> make World will complete in the build tree using only X source from the
>> build tree.
>>
>> build-from-tarballs.sh will not compile unless you install each part
>> built into the runtime location on the build system. DESTDIR is not honored
>> for include files for example. Further some of the modules depend on a built
>> and installed Mesa to compile. And Mesa depends on X11 stuff.
>> build-from-tarballs.sh has to be split into before Mesa and after Mesa
>> builds. 
>>
>> This all means that it is hard to build modular without modifing
>> build-from-tarballs.sh and having a build machine that you can sacrifice to
>> the build process. 
>>     
>
> build-from-tarballs is far from ideal, certainly.  It was good enough to get 
> 7.0 bootstrapped, and hasn't really seen much love since then.
>
> Here's the thing.  Of the people who want the ability to build the world from 
> source without relying on external packaging, no one has come up with 
> anything better.  Many people have said they would _like_ something better; 
> I've not seen anything _done_.  Oh, except for the jhbuild stuff, but then no 
> one wants to use jhbuild, they just want something "simple" like a shell 
> script, even though to make one complex enough to handle rebuilding all of X 
> from scratch, you very nearly have to reinvent jhbuild.
>   
I have fixed enough of build-from-tarballs.sh to make it work for me:
can do build if -b and install if -i, splits into two passes to allow 
Mesa to
be built in the middle. I also knocked out all the modules I do not need
to get the build time down.

Would this better build-from-tarballs.sh be for interest? I will need to
do a little bit more work to make it suitable for others to use. (add
usage, allow all modules to build).

>> I'm bothering to do all this because I need to run 7.1 on FC4 that has
>> no kits for 7.1.
>>     
>
> You might be better served to just reuse the packaging that already exists for 
> rawhide, and use mock to rebuild those SRPMs against FC4.  I believe Mike's 
> done it, and it's probably less painful that trying to fix up the tarball 
> script.  For that matter, you could very likely just _install_ the built 
> rawhide SRPMs with 'rpm --nodeps' on an FC4 system with no X installed and 
> get what you want.
>   
I thought about doing that but I was concerned by all the dependencies 
that are different
between FC4 and FC5, not least the GCC runtime has new etry points on 
FC5 and mean
FC5 built exe's may fail to load under FC4.
> In fact, this comes up often enough that I'm tempted to just build an FC4 yum 
> repo with X bits that match rawhide.
>
> - ajax
>   
Barry