X11 in Macports

[Jeremy Huddleston]

For those of you who don't know me, I took over development of X11 in  
OSX when Ben Byer moved on to bigger and better things at the  
beginning of 2009.  I've been poke, prodded, nudged, and otherwise  
motivated into trying to "fix the X11 problem in Macports" as well...  
so I figured I'd make some proper introductions, and offer some  
suggestions to see what everyone's thoughts are on the subject before  
I start changing things only to have 100 people lash out at me for  
"breaking" something... so here goes...

1) The dependency issue

X11 lives in a grey area in Macports' dependency policy.  X11 is  
actually given as the example for something that is appropriate to use  
the lib:* or bin:* dependency rather than a port:* dependency, yet  
there are plenty of ports that are still using a port: dependency.  I  
believe this is mainly for things like libXrender (rather than libX11)  
as a legacy of what was available in Tiger's X11.  I'd very much like  
to use anything in /usr/X11/* over installing a duplicate in /opt/ 
local, and I'm sure others are in the same boat.  I have seen a fair  
share of bug reports on xquartz-dev that came about simply because the  
macports version didn't have a fix that was in the system version or  
macports config files (eg: for fontconfig) didn't match system  
configurations, so users were wondering why some fonts weren't  
available in some programs.

I intend to go through all the x11 related ports and update  
dependencies to be lib: or bin: where appropriate instead of port: (if  
a port is not nomaintainer or openmaintainer, I will file a bug in  
trac to be on the safe side... unless general consensus here is that  
such reports would be overkill and I should just do it myself)

2) The other dependency issue

Now, for what port to actually depend on... Quickly grepping though  
the code, I have seen the following dependencies for libX11:

lib:libX11.6:XFree86
lib:libX11.6:xorg
lib:libX11:XFree86
lib:libX11:xorg
lib:libX11:xorg-libX11

I'd like to standardize this to be xorg-libX11

3) The old monolith xorg and XFree86

I'd like to eventually punt these in favor of having just one X11  
solution in Macports based on the latest release.



Thoughts?