Forcing Macports libs for X11 (Was Re: Error installing xpdf with openmotif)

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Dec 28, 2008, at 01:36, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

>
> On Dec 28, 2008, at 02:58, Jeremy Huddleston wrote:

<snip/>

>> I'm sorry if this starts a major flame war, but this needs to be  
>> brought up. Mixing system and macports libs for X11 causes too many  
>> problems.
>
>
> By all means! We should figure this situation out. I came to  
> MacPorts after this decision was already in place. But it seemed  
> like a good decision to me because Apple's X11.app worked well on  
> Tiger and the alternative provided by the XFree86 port had some  
> oddities. I never tried the xorg variety. In any case you could only  
> choose to have one of the three because they all installed to $ 
> {x11prefix}.
>
> I think you're now changing it so xorg installs in ${prefix}, so it  
> xorg could coexist with Apple X11?

Yeah... in fact you can 'sudo port install xorg-server' and get a  
brand new /Applications/Macports/X11.app with libs and such in $ 
{prefix} ... the only caveats that I know of right now with this are:

1) The "mixing" problems referenced below
2) You still need the "Apple" X11 installed in ${x11prefix} since we  
use their fonts (I haven't gotten around to making the xorg-font-*  
ports yet)

> Will using xorg mean I would open an xorg-provided X11 app instead  
> of Apple's X11.app, and if so, would it work the same as Apple's?

I haven't touched the 'xorg' port itself... it's still antiquated...  
but I think it should become a meta-package for xorg-server and the  
expected "base" X11 applications.

As for the xorg-server port itself, it creates almost the same X11.app  
as provided by http://xquartz.macosforge.org ... thus it does work the  
same as "Apple's" because it is Apple's... the only difference on  
Leopard is that it doesn't use the launchd startup mechanism (I didn't  
want to deal with conflit issues between the macports and "official"  
X11.app LaunchAgents for that...)

>> Here are the two that stand out in my head most:
>>
>> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/17558
>> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/17631
>>
>> Additionally, ignoring the system libs would allow us to get past  
>> the "bad .la files" bugs in X11SDK:
>> http://trac.macports.org/ticket/17356 etc
>>
>> Changing the X11 policy to use port:* dependencies for X11 libs  
>> will allow us to control these variables and eliminate a major  
>> headache.
>>
>> Furthermore, I suggest we create a +system_x11 variant to all of  
>> the X11 lib packages which would cause them to just be stubs, so  
>> people could continue to use their system X11 by enabling that  
>> variant...