[csw-maintainers] Poll on our future X11 library usage

Philip Brown phil at bolthole.com
Tue Jun 9 17:41:39 CEST 2009


hi folks,

a few maintainers have been discussing what to do about X11 libs, going
forward.
I just shared the following poll to our user list. Please also weigh in.

http://doodle.com/73mdviypknk63y7e


Here's the full body of the email i sent to the users list, if you are
curious, and not on the list:
  ------------------------------------------------------------
Hello CSW users,

This is a very important poll, for the future of X11 support in CSW
packages going forward.

We are faced with a tough technical decision to make.
While the implementation details are technical, the major impact is more
user based.
So, we are asking you, the users, to tell us what you would prefer!

For 6 years now, we have based virtually all our X11 dependant programs, on
the X11 libraries supplied by Solaris itself.

Unfortunately, the latest versions of gtk, which are required by the latest
versions of things like firefox, etc. require newer versions of basic
things like libX11 and so on, than older versions of Solaris provide.

We are obviously going to provide firefox. So we are also going to provide
the required libraries in one way or another.

The question then becomes; from this point on, do we have ALL X11 programs 
use the CSW X11 libraries?
Or do we have only the programs that "need" the new stuff, use the new
stuff in /opt/csw/X11, whereas others that are less fancy (ie: not gtk
based) use the sun libs in /usr/openwin/lib

So far, there is some inclination to no longer use the Sun libs.
This would mean that, if you still use some sun graphical programs, you
would potentially have a bit more redundancy in the shared library
department.

The "good news", is that it should only amount to around 4 megabytes of
extra ram used up this way, vs using sun X11 libraries. That's total
extra; it's a one-time hit, not a per-process cost.

Please let us know what you, our users, would prefer.

We've set up a poll for this issue, at

http://doodle.com/73mdviypknk63y7e




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