xinit change of behavior/many added dependencies

[bentruscott]

Hello,

I apologize if this has already been addressed elsewhere. I wasn't able 
to find anything directly relevant on searching the mailing list 
archives.

Around this time last year, xinit was changed to require fbpanel along 
with many other packages 
(https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree-announce/2014-11/msg00004.html). The 
behavior was also changed to try desperately to start a client (any 
client!) along with the server, and a non-optional Start Menu entry was 
also added.

Since then, fbpanel has been removed 
(http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2015-07/msg00102.html), but most of the 
dependencies are still there and the Start Menu entry is still 
mandatorily created. To be clear, none of them are actually required for 
X to function, but are solely in support of UI "niceties", which I 
personally don't need or want. The dependencies include icon packs, 
image libraries, and even libthai0 (Thai language support). I haven't 
counted it up carefully, but all this comes to somewhere north of 100MB 
of spurious packages.

This has been queried before 
(http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2015-03/msg00371.html, 
http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2015-07/msg00455.html), but without any 
concrete resolution, as far as I can see.

The current list of dependencies for xinit (alone) is as follows:

----

adwaita-icon-theme	(3.14.1-1)
	GNOME desktop icon theme
	Required by: adwaita-themes, libgtk2.0_0

adwaita-themes	(3.14.2.3-2)
	Default GNOME themes
	Required by: xinit

gdk-pixbuf2.0-svg	(2.40.9-1)
	GdkPixbuf loader for SVG
	Required by: adwaita-themes

gnome-menus	(3.13.3-3)
	GNOME Desktop Menu implementation
	Required by: libgnome-menu3_0

gtk-update-icon-cache	(3.14.13-1)
	GTK+ icon theme cache utility
	Required by: libgtk2.0_0

gtk2.0-engines-pixmap	(2.24.28-2)
	Pixmap theme engine for GTK+
	Required by: adwaita-themes

hicolor-icon-theme	(0.12-1)
	Freedesktop.org default fallback icon theme
	Required by: adwaita-icon-theme

libcroco0.6_3	(0.6.8-1)
	GNOME CSS parser library (runtime)
	Required by: librsvg2_2

libgdk_pixbuf2.0_0	(2.31.7-1)
	GNOME image loading library (runtime)
	Required by: xwin-xdg-menu, libgtk2.0_0, gdk-pixbuf2.0-svg, 
gtk2.0-engines-pixmap, gtk-update-icon-cache, librsvg2_2

libgnome-menu3_0	(3.13.3-3)
	GNOME Desktop Menu implementation
	Required by: xwin-xdg-menu

libgtk2.0_0	(2.24.28-2)
	GTK+ X11 GUI toolkit (runtime)
	Required by: adwaita-themes, xwin-xdg-menu, gtk2.0-engines-pixmap

libjasper1	(1.900.1-15)
	JPEG-2000 codec library (runtime)
	Required by: libgdk_pixbuf2.0_0

libjbig2	(2.0-14)
	JBIG1 codec
	Required by: libtiff6

libjpeg8	(1.4.2-1)
	JPEG library with SIMD acceleration
	Required by: libgdk_pixbuf2.0_0, libjasper1, libtiff6

libpango1.0_0	(1.36.8-1)
	GNOME text layout and rendering library
	Required by: libgtk2.0_0, librsvg2_2

librsvg2_2	(2.40.9-1)
	GNOME Scalable Vector Graphics library (runtime)
	Required by: gdk-pixbuf2.0-svg

libthai0	(0.1.21-1)
	Thai language support library
	Required by: libpango1.0_0

libtiff6	(4.0.6-1)
	TIFF image library
	Required by: libgdk_pixbuf2.0_0

xwin-xdg-menu	(20150708-1)
	An XDG Desktop Menu Specification menu for the Windows notification 
area
	Required by: xinit

----

I wonder, is it really, strictly necessary to have all of this stuff 
required by the xinit package? My use case for X is to start a server 
(in multiwindow mode) without any clients, ssh into some compute 
cluster, and start a remote client. xinit used to cope with this 
beautifully, but now seems to work against it as much as possible.

To my mind, it would be a lot better if all of the extra UI gadgets and 
Start Menu entry could be hived off into a separate package, so that the 
server can stand by itself for those who don't need anything more. Right 
now, whenever I update Cygwin, I have to uninstall xinit, let the rest 
be updated, and then reinstall xinit without allowing these dependencies 
to be selected. It's more hassle than it could be, that's for sure.

I'd be grateful for anyone's comments on the matter or pointers to 
other discussions I might have missed.

Thanks a lot,

Ben Truscott

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