Comments on bug 140214 - the removal of X utilities?

[William Hooper]

Bryan Ischo said:
[snip]
> That the extra effort that Mike A. Harris went
> through...
[snip]

Please look at the spec file.  Adding a handful of "rm -f" commands isn't
a lot of extra effort to remove unwanted (and potentially unmaintained)
binaries.

> So once again, to build these handful of very small programs one would
> have to download an entire X11 distribution (hundreds of megabytes?) and
> build the whole thing?  Does that even make sense?

I haven't looked at the code upstream.  If it takes the whole source, then
yes it makes sense.  If they are provided in extras only people that want
to rebuild them would have to download the sources.  The current xorg-x11
SRPM is 52 MB.

Looking at upstream's CVS, though, the programs removed seem to be all in
their own directories, so it would be interesting to see if they will
build just against the installed -devel package.

> Look, I'm not averse to joining the extras mailing list and developing my
>  own RPM if that's what has to happen,

That is what has to happen.

> but it would be really nice to get
> a good reason why all of that effort has to be put forth by me and all of
> the users who ever want to use these programs, rather than just following
>  a more logical path when it comes to modularizing these programs into
> their own RPM at the time that the base software on which the RPMs are
> based is organized the same way.

You are assuming that the packages will be included after they are removed
from the X.org source upstream.  This doesn't appear to be a valid
assumption.   To quote Mike "There are no plans of adding these removed
applications back to the Fedora Core however."

It doesn't matter if they are part of the X.org source or separate.  A
quick look at the upstream mailing lists shows that the lack of
maintainers is driving the removal/seperation of these packages upstream,
too.

--
William Hooper