Re: XFree86 modularization

At 11:47 PM -0400 5/8/03, Owen Taylor wrote:
>Hi Egbert,
>
>Here's a quick (if late) writeup of my thoughts on X modularization;
>I'm not sure it really addresses your questions, since the
>driver interfaces are the part of X that I'm least familiar
>with, but perhaps it is useful anyways.
>
>  * One thing I personally would to like to see split apart, or in
>    fact, killed from XFree86 is copies of libraries that are
>    independently maintained ... FreeType, zlib, expat, and now
>    fontconfig. People whine about external dependencies, but in
>    the end sucked in copies of the libraries do more harm both
>    maintenance headaches and in multiple conflicting installs.

Here's a counter example: In recent history this would have caused 
great difficulties on Darwin/Mac OS X with Freetype. Freetype is 
largely only installed on Mac OS X as part of XFree86. Although 
Freetype supports Mac OS X, the Freetype team has no committers with 
a Mac OS X box. Until a few days ago you could not even build 
standard Freetype on Mac OS X using gcc but had to use a proprietary 
compiler. I do not mean to pick on the Freetype team--they do a great 
job. Freetype has just had a different emphasis with regards to which 
platforms they support. However, whenever XFree86 depends on an 
external library that may not have the same level of support for all 
the platforms XFree86 supports, you need to have XFree86 maintain a 
local copy of the library.

--Torrey