[csw-maintainers] Important: X11 related packages, and buildfarm

[Philip Brown]

Hi folks,
this is to let everyone know what is going on with X related packages these
days.

Summary: We are in a transition period. things under /opt/csw/X11 are
deprecated. We are in the process of recompiling graphical foundation stuff
to be sun X11 dependant once more, so be aware.
Status is updated on http://wiki.opencsw.org/project-x11-reloaded

Details:
Many months ago now, we started down a road of modernization for our X11
related libs. Tehre were multiple reasons for this decision; one of which
was that we started to see more and more expectation of the newer X11
development files, in newer stuff that is gtk related.

We started down a transition road, of first providing
the latest X11 core libs in /opt/csw/X11 (X11R7), and then recompiling
various foundational libraries to use those, instead of sun ones.


We just started rerolling things like xpm, and gtk, to use the new libs.
Unfortunately, this turned out to not be the best path, for two reasons.
One of which was that we lose some hardware acceleration, by not using Sun
X11 libs. Another was that there started to be cross-version pollution of 
"libX11.so".  Some higher level applications ended up pulling in both our
version, and the sun version. This is Not Good.
"back in the day", we already did some ugly hacks to squeeze in libXrender
for solaris 8, even when solaris 10 technically shipped with it.
So, we are now taking that one further, and doing it "nicely".
(fyi, the sol10 xrender is now too old to use anyway)

We now have the package "sunx11_devel". This provides a few foundational
things that are only needed at compile time, such as certain magic
pkg-config ".pc" files that tend to be expected from modern packages these
days.  This allowed compilation of an up to date libXrender, and things are
now progressing from there.

Things are going well, but this is a Very Large Effort. 
On the one hand, we need to recompile all the CSW-X11 converted packages,
back to use sun X11. But even after that... we need to then keep updating
our X chain, so we can do things like get a new GNOME in the house!

So, more volunteers in this effort to share the load around, would be
greatly appreciated. Even being willing to pick up just one piece here and
there(in a timely manner!) would be a great help to avoid burnout in those
folks who are currently involved in it.