Further notes on 7.4

[Dan Nicholson]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 03:22:25PM -0700, Dan Nicholson wrote:
>
>> - imake/xorg-cf-files: Sadly, some 3rd party X packages still use imake.
>
> Right, but the ones which still use a bizzare build system will probably
> require other weird crap, so if it's well documented how to get a
> functioning imake setup installed, that shouldn't be a problem.  There's
> nothing stopping distributions carrying them, since they never change,
> making it trivial for 99% of our users.

I remembered a good reason why these should still be installed. Tons
of autotooled X programs (certainly in GNOME) use the autoconf macros
AC_PATH_X or AC_PATH_XTRA to find the X installation. These use xmkmf
to find it or fall back to a lame non-multilib-aware search path when
xmkmf is not available. See _AC_PATH_X_XMKMF and _AC_PATH_X_DIRECT in
/usr/share/autoconf/autoconf/libs.m4. In the modern world, all these
programs should be using pkg-config to find the X libraries they need,
but it'll be a while till that's widespread.

--
Dan