X11 in Macports

[Joshua Root]

Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> 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)

As Ryan explained, that's only a good idea on Darwin 9 (and of course,
development of its X11 will eventually stop too...) So maybe a better
idea is to delete the unneeded dependencies in a 'platform darwin 9'
section. Or, only add them on darwin 7 and 8, that way non-Darwin
platforms could also use their own libs if present. (Good idea? I don't
know.)

>> I'd like to standardize this to be xorg-libX11
> 
> We did have consensus and standardization: everything that needed X11
> declared a dependency on "lib:libX11.6:XFree86". Then some people
> started changing some ports to "lib:libX11.6:xorg" for an unknown reason.

It doesn't matter so much what they depend on, as long as that port has
a check like that currently in XFree86 (since we really want people to
use Apple's binary X11 on Mac OS X). So the depended-on port will only
be installed on other platforms, in which case I think xorg-libX11 is
fine. Hopefully users on non-Mac platforms will know that they also need
an X server somewhere.

>> 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.

A port that installed XQuartz (or the appropriate Apple X11 package on
older OSes) would be nice, actually. Would save us having to tell users
"install X11 like it says on the Installing MacPorts page" all the time.

> As long as both projects continue to exist and function on current OSes,
> there's no reason to delete one or the other, however, is there? Choice
> is a good thing, and we certainly have other cases of duplicate
> functionality in ports.

Agreed - though xorg is broken at present.

- Josh