Creating new extras package for missing xorg-x11 programs

[Bryan Ischo]

Hi all.  After some discussion in bug 140214, and on the Fedora Users
mailing list (fedora-list at redhat.com), I have decided to try to build a
new extras package to supply some of the X11 utility programs which have
been removed from the xorg-x11 package.

These programs include some very small and probably not-frequently-used
programs: xbiff, xditview, and xeyes.  Mostly I am concerned about xbiff,
but I thought I'd include the other programs since they are so small, so
that no one else who wants them will have to go through the trouble of
building their own extras RPM for them.

Technically these programs are a part of the X.org software release but
the Fedora developers have decided to remove them from the base package,
because their functionality is apparently redundant with some other
programs available in Fedora Core (but not from my perspective as there is
no program that does exactly what xbiff does for my purposes).

Because there has been some suggestion that the X.org team is reorganizing
the base X11 distribution for the R7 release, it seems that any SPEC file
that I make now will likely be completely obsoleted at that time.  For
this reason I want to do the simplest, easiest thing necessary to build a
spec file for these programs.  Once the X.org team has reorganized their
source tree into a format which is not expected to change in the near
future, I'll do the extra work of making a spec file 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.

The X.org makefile system is quite complicated and I am not sure it will
be worth the trouble to investigate trying to build just these programs
when compiling the rpm from the source rpm.  The existing xorg-x11 spec
file seems to take the same approach; it lets the X.org makefiles do their
thing and then as a post-processing step removes the built files that it
doesn't want to install.  I'd do something similar, using the xorg-x11
spec file as a base.

Does this sound like a reasonable approach?

What should I name this spec file/rpm?

Thanks, and best wishes,
Bryan

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Bryan Ischo             bryan at ischo.com                          N, R, 6
New York, NY, USA       http://www.ischo.com              RedHat Linux 9
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