modular -> monolithic

[Donnie Berkholz]

On 12:46 Wed 23 Jan     , Matthias Hopf wrote:
> Everybody is using their own scripts. Everybody who's with X for some
> time now.
> There is no *official* script for fetching/building X - and I honestly
> think that this is a major show stopper for new contributors. We also
> don't have a good wiki page (or even structure(!)) describing the build
> process on a top level.
> 
> This is not unsolvable, so maybe it's a good time to discuss, how this
> build system should look like, and on what base it should work. I did
> some contributions to build.sh, but I don't consider this to be even
> remotely good enough to actually being worked on.
> 
> IMHO a good build system would have to
> 
> - be able to build a single subsystem or everything(TM)
> - be able to clone/update subsystems
> - fetch all dependencies when building a single subsystem
> - track these dependencies, so no subsystems are built that are not
>   needed, no automake or configure if not necessary
> - configure-once-run-without-arguments (but overwriteable)
> - install the systems in a user specified directory
> - have a --dry-run or -n option for only showing what it would do
> - build drm and Mesa as well
> - be able to build outside the source directory
> - have a low dependency list itself (e.g. is perl ok?)
> 
> So are there already any solutions out there that come even close to
> this list? Any additional features that are a must?

I'm confused about why anyone would want to implement a custom package 
manager purely for Xorg. That seems like another maintenance burden for 
something we don't actually want to be involved with, just like imake. 
There are plenty of package managers already. I know Gentoo's can pretty 
easily do almost everything in the above list, using live git, because 
that's what I do.

Thanks,
Donnie