[Fwd: Creating new extras package for missing xorg-x11 programs]

[Bryan Ischo]

> Bryan Ischo (bji-fedora at ischo.com) said:
>> which is clean and neat.  For the time being, I'm thinking of just
>> taking the existing xorg-x11 spec file and modifying it for the
>> purposes of creating an rpm that installs just the three programs I
>> have
>> mentioned.
>
> That would be an awfully large source RPM. :)

I agree completely.  However this approach was suggested by a user on the
fedora user's list, as being similar to one used by one of the VNC rpm's.

Since it is difficult to build any of the programs in the X.org software
distribution without building everything (to my limited knowledge), and
since the X.org structure is supposed to be changing with the upcoming R7
release (which is I guess why the Fedora developers decided to pull some
of the programs out of the Fedora xorg-x11 package ahead of that change),
I'd rather not mess with the X.org makefiles.  Once the X.org tree is
restructured according to their plans, I would make a "real" spec file
that built just those (presumably easy to build independently of the rest
of the X.org tree) programs that are to be installed by the rpm.

As was pointed out on fedora user's, the SRPM would be ridiculously large
for the purposes of building only a couple of hundred K of installed
files, but this would only be an issue for those who build from SRPM; the
RPMs themselves would be quite small.

>> Does this sound like a reasonable approach?
>
> I suspect you could pull some of them out, do some Imake magic,
> and build them. Not sure how much pain that would be though.

I suspect it would be alot of pain.  And I'm not sure the pain is worth it
if the X.org people are really going to be reorganizing their tree as was
suggested by the Fedora team, as the reason for pre-emptively removing
some programs from the xorg-x11 rpm.

However, I will take your comments under advisement and first do some real
exploring to see how difficult it would be to shrink the source RPM down
by including just the files that need to be built.

Being kind of unfamiliar with source RPMs - would I really be able to just
pull a subset of files from the X.org software distribution for including
in my source RPM?  I know that RPM makes it easy to include additional
patches along with a source distribution to be built, I'm not so clear on
the concept of making a separate, not-released-by-the-original-authors
version of their code (i.e. one which only includes the programs I am
interested in) to put into the source RPM, to avoid including the entire
X.org tree.

>> What should I name this spec file/rpm?
>
> I'd say xorg-x11-extra-tools, or something like that.

That sounds like a fine name to me.  I will use it.

Thanks,
Bryan

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Bryan Ischo             bryan at ischo.com                          N, R, 6
New York, NY, USA       http://www.ischo.com            RedHat Linux 7.3
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