[Xquartz-dev] 2.3.0-rc5

[Martin Costabel]

Jeremy Huddleston wrote:
[]
> Please offer your comments, since this .la "fix" is entirely *FOR*  
> Fink and Macports.

If we could simply start from scratch when building packages, this 
wouldn't be a problem. Until Tiger, there were no .la files in X11, as 
far as I remember.

But as it is now, building against a *.la-less X11 in an environment 
that was built against an X11 with *.la files does not work, so this 
would require to rebuild everything that uses X11, and for Fink this 
would basically mean to scrap everything and to rebuild everything.

If you really want my opinion, I would propose to forget the separation 
of X11 into X11User and X11SDK and distribute (as you are doing with 
xquartz) everything in one package (perhaps without the man pages, as it 
was recently started). This has almost no drawback and a lot of advantages.

The X11SDK.pkg is tiny in comparison with the X11User.pkg (less than 
5MB), in particular because the X11User.pkg contains already a lot of 
files that one normally would rather put into a dev package, because 
they are not needed at runtime:
- foo.dylib symlinks such as /usr/X11/lib/libGL.dylib
- package-config *.pc files
- *-config executables such as freetype-config
- the imake template directory /usr/X11/lib/X11/config ;-)
Migrating the 600 or so remaining header and *.la files over to X11User 
would not make much difference.
On the other hand, the separation of X11SDK from X11User has been the 
cause of a lot of grief for Fink users (and certainly others) over the 
years.
If you have only one package, keeping *.la and *.dylibs in sync should 
be automatic.

-- 
Martin