x.org is Hacker Trash

[Pavel Troller]

> On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 01:49:54AM -0700, xorg sucks wrote:
> > I had spent so much of my life on this TRAIN WRECK of
> > a project that it was virtually painless to make an
> > account specifically for this email.
> > 
> > In Brief:  WTF?
> > 
> > What's with you Open Source ninnies and your love for
> > customization? Who the hell needs more than one way to
> > get the source?
> 
> I'm not even involved with the internals of X.org, but I can answer
> this question anyway: 
> 
> You Are Not The Target Customer For X.org.
> 
> Distribution packagers are. 
> 
I'm not the author of the original mail, however, I can agree with him in many
aspects.
  To clarify my position:
  I'm the "Distribution Packager".
  I have my own, private distribution, established in 1994. It is _NOT_ based
on any current publicly known distro. I cannot reuse any of official packages
for any distro - and what's the most important, i DON'T WANT it. I have my own
ways to compile, install, etc.
  So, I believe that +++I Am The Target Customer For X.org+++.
  I'm successfully compiling all the Linux stuff starting with kernel, over
glibc, gcc suite etc. etc., ending with beasts like KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice etc,
which are even bigger and more complex than X.Org.
  Yes, I CAN build X.org. 
  Currently I'm running an x server from git master, xf86-video-intel-1.9.93,
most of the X libs are also from git master.
  But I wanted to build an official release, say, 7.2.0.
  I failed. I didn't find anywhere, which particular versions of various
components must be put together to make it working. It can be compiled, but
it doesn't work then.
  For example, I mixed randrproto-1.2 with xserver-1.2.0. What a surprise: it
crashed. I had to ask and I've got an answer: you need randrproto-1.0.
  IS SUCH AN INFORMATION AVAILABLE ANYWHERE ? I'm afraid not. At least I didn't
find it, and I had to waste the time of a developer to answer my stupid
question.
  And when I have the git repo fully downloaded, do you want me to download
all the official 7.2 tarballs too ? I refuse. It should be possible to build
every release, every tag, using one git repo. It's the main goal of git, to
allow this. Or am I wrong ?
  For example, mozilla people also don't keep unified versioning of their
components. But they have a magic makefile, client.mk. Say you want to build
Firefox-2.0.0.2. It's very easy. You just do the following simple steps:
- cvs log client.mk
- Find the particular CVS tag of your desired release
- cvs up -r<your_favourite_tag> client.mk
- make -f client.mk checkout
... and your CVS working copy is adjusted to contain a perfectly tuned tree
just ready to build.
  Would be something similar possible with X.org ? A simple script, which
just adjusts the git trees of X.org components to match them together.
  My nature is to be calm, not to write such a mails, however, from my point
of view, building X.org is one of the most complex tasks for a Linux 
distribution packager, probably the most complex one. 
                                           With regards, Pavel Troller