Some confusion about XFree86

[Tabitha McNerney]

On 1/1/08, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
>
> On Jan 1, 2008, at 07:35, Tabitha McNerney wrote:
>
> > Its been a while since I've made a bunch of MacPorts, but I have an
> > Xserve running Leopard Server 10.5.1 and wanted to give it a try
> > with MacPorts 1.6.0.
> >
> > I had problems building XFree86 (I tried to install with the -d
> > debug option and have saved the output in case it might be useful
> > to submit to the Trac bug reporting system). Before submitting
> > anything, I started poking around a bit, looking at some of the
> > more recent posts about Leopard and XFree86 on the MacPorts mailing
> > list and also noticing that Apple's X11 app is now based on X.org.
> >
> > I noticed that there are also some new (well, new since I last
> > tried MacPorts 1.5.0 on a Tiger Server system in August of 2007),
> > ports that seem to be related to X, such as xorg-util-macros and
> > xorg-xproto (but even these newish ports still depend on XFree86).
> >
> > I'm wondering if anyone can provide a little clearer lay of the
> > land / big picture to help me fill in the missing pieces (with
> > apologies if there is a lot more details interwoven into these mail
> > threads). Are there any recommended paths to take with regard to
> > X11 app or building XFree86 port? Has anyone else had failure
> > building XFree86 on Leopard Server 10.5.1 or Leopard 10.5.1?
>
> I guess the first question is: why do you want to build XFree86?
> Ports that depend on XFree86 only do so in the event that you have
> not installed Apple X11. MacPorts installation documents state that
> you must install Apple X11. Therefore, nobody should need to install
> the XFree86 port, and in fact, you cannot do so if Apple X11 is
> already installed, which it is now by default on Leopard.


Ryan, this is, in hindsight, a good question. I had, by habit in the past,
been building the Mac(Darwin) Port, XFree86, mostly because IIRC the Apple
X11 app was historically not open source totally and I was concerned about
moving to a possible proprietary application. But, based on what I've read
yesterday, I guess X11 from Apple has been re-based on X.org now so I can
see how that would, in essence, deprecate the need to build XFree86.

With that being said, so if XFree86 is pretty much no longer needed in lieu
of the changes to Apple's X11 app on Leopard, then what about some of the X
Windows ports such as wireshark? Checking out the dependencies for
wireshark, I can trace its dependencies to the XFree86 port:

$ ports deps wireshark
> wireshark has library dependencies on:
>         glib2
>         gtk2
>         openssl
>         libpcap
>         zlib
>

...

$ port deps gtk2
> gtk2 has library dependencies on:
>         cairo
>         fontconfig
>         freetype
>         glib2
>         jpeg
>         tiff
>         libiconv
>         libpng
>         atk
>         pango
>         gettext
>         render
>         zlib
>         xrender
>         xorg
>

...

$ port deps pango
>         glib2
>         XFree86
>         Xft2
>         cairo
>         fontconfig
>


Thanks for the clearing some of my confusion.

Best regards,

T.M.
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