Re: x11 clashes of base and pkg [Was Re: Confusing versioning scheme of freetyp2?]

["Ian D. Leroux" <idleroux%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

On Mon, May 7, 2018, at 13:10, Cág wrote:
> Mayuresh wrote:
> > Curious about the thought process behind having x11 in the base. Any
> > idea about other BSD systems - do they have x11 in the base?
>
> Free/Dragonfly don't have it in the base. NetBSD cannot go the OpenBSD
> path because it has pkgsrc. OpenBSD, having Xorg in the base, doesn't
> have it in the repository; all packages are linked against the base
> X11. I guess there are none that have it both ways.

This comes up periodically.  The basic reason NetBSD has an x11 in base
is that NetBSD supports platforms which upstream Xorg does not.  Pkgsrc
needs to have support for building x11 anyway because it is used on non-
NetBSD platforms that don't have x11 in base (or, in some cases, don't
have much of a base system at all).  Given the limited resources of the
project and the additional work required to maintain portability, base
x11 tends to lag behind upstream (though I don't think this is as bad
now as it was at the time of the XFree86->Xorg transition), so people
who want the latest-and-greatest Xorg, on platforms which Xorg
supports, want to be able to install it from pkgsrc.

Any given pkg/ tree should use "xsrc"/base x11 or "modular"/pkgsrc x11,
but not both.  I build everything against base x11, even on amd64, and
have been perfectly happy with the results.

It may be worth discussing which x11 should be used for binary packages
on common platforms (I don't care, I build from source anyway).  But
stripping xsrc out of base entirely, or making it difficult to use the
base x11 when building packages, has serious implications for the
usefulness of NetBSD on unusual hardware.  That decision should not be
taken lightly.

-- IDL