Attn developers: libdps and libdpstk now obsoleted by X.Org Foundation.

[Mike A. Harris]

The libdps and libdpstk libraries have been deprecated for several
releases of the X Window System now (approximately 2 years or more),
and upstream X.Org has disabled them from being built in X11R7.

Generally speaking, this is not a problem because there has never
been an open source DPS server-side extension in the XFree86 or
X.Org X servers[1], so the DPS functionality is generally not useful
anyway, and is more or less unused - which is the primary reason
it was deprecated upstream.

This change should have very small effect overall on developers
at large, however it is possible that some applications in Fedora
Core, Fedora Extras, or elsewhere, might have optional DPS support,
and might currently have it enabled by default still.  Since DPS
has been publically deprecated for several years now however, it is
likely there are not many applications building with DPS support
by default currently.

Nonetheless, as a notice to all Fedora Core and Fedora Extras
developers, and other rpm package maintainers out there, please
check all of your rpm packages which link to X libraries, and
examine them for build or runtime dependencies on libdps and
libdpstk.  If you find any such packages, have a look at their
./configure options to see if they have an option to disable
DPS support.  Normally this should be something like:

./configure --disable-dps

Please update your packages as soon as possible to remove the
dependency on DPS, as the DPS libraries will vanish soon in
rawhide, once the modular X11R7 gets integrated into our
development tree.

If anyone has any questions or concerns about the obsolescence
of the dps libraries, please subscribe to the
xorg at lists.freedesktop.org mailing list where you may discuss
any concerns to the relevant upstream X.Org developers.

Thanks in advance.


[1] The http://dps.sf.net project, was an OSS project to implement
DPS support for the XFree86 server, however that code was never
integrated into XFree86 nor X.Org sources, and has not to the
best of my knowledge ever been shipped by many OS distributions
(if any at all).  The DPS project has long since been abandoned
by it's primary developer, and has been dead for years now.