HEADS-UP: Modular X11 (ALL maintainers, please read)

[Yaakov S (Cygwin Ports)]

Igor Peshansky wrote:
> Not only that, it will affect many users' shortcuts.  For example, many
> users have a shortcut to xterm that says something like
> 
> c:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\run /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm [options]
> 
> Some have quite a few.  If we go through with this change, we'll need to
> find a good way of dealing with the move so that shortcuts either won't
> need to be changed, or can be changed automatically.
> 
> FWIW, we cannot use mounts, since shortcuts use Win32 paths.

Obviously X-startup-scripts and X-start-menu-icons will have to be 
updated, but I'm not sure about how to handle user-created shortcuts.

> Yes.  Its purpose is the same as xpm-nox -- to allow rendering postscript
> to a non-screen device in batch mode.  People who don't have X may still
> want to do this, for example to convert postscript to PDF.

Since X11 will now be *modular*, is that such a big deal?  Based on the 
current ghostscript-8.50 dependecies, the X11 gs should require a total 
of 6 X11 runtime libraries and libX11-data.

Since I've packaged the runtime libraries separately from the 
development libs (i.e. libSM source -> libSM6 runtime and libSM devel 
and docs), I wouldn't consider this excessive.

> You'll also have to think of things like X-startup-scripts.  While they
> are not part of the X server proper, many people rely on them to start the
> X server.  There may also be quite a few custom scripts with hard-coded
> paths, but a simple symlink of /usr/X11R6->/usr should do the trick for
> those.

Indeed, Gentoo has had a /usr/X11R6->/usr symlink since xorg-x11-6.8, 
and I was considering the same, but that will only be possible once 
everything else moves out of /usr/X11R6, and AFAIK won't help with the 
Windows shortcuts.


Yaakov