Dropping Base X group? [Was: Re: KDE logout options with F8]

[Adam Jackson]

On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 00:32 +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
> On 2007-10-31, 18:49 GMT, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > I have suggested at least 2 technical solutions, none of which 
> > needs any changes to Anaconda:
> 
> May add one more possible solution: what about dropping Base 
> X group from anaconda altogether and why not to treat it as 
> a library, which is required by another components (do we have 
> a group for glibc)?

The major problem with this is there's almost nothing in the distro that
requires the X server itself at the rpm level.  The various X drivers
do, but nothing requires them besides the xorg-x11-drivers metapackage.
rhpxl and compiz require Xorg, but it's quite possible to want a system
without them, so you don't want to have just those two be responsible
for pulling in the X server.

The base-x group in comps is actually pretty minimal on its own.  I'd be
happy with trimming it down to the bare minimum, marking it non-visible,
and having the various desktop groups depend on it (in comps, not in
their packaging).

Of course this is predicated on comps having a groupreq mechanism, which
it doesn't.

> The other group is much more interesting. I really don't like 
> a tendency of Fedora moving with its system requirements 
> somewhere close to the one of Windows Vista (yes, we would have 
> to fix anaconda first, but that's another issue, let's keep this 
> X specific). It would be nice if people who are interested in 
> this created some group of packages (with their own desktop 
> manager? -- is there anything else than [gkx]dm?) so that we 
> could fourth environment (even though this would be probably very 
> virtual not consisting from packages originally intended to be 
> part of one environment) besides Gnome, KDE, and XFCE. Are there 
> any friends of WindowMaker around here (that would be nice for 
> higher degree of compatibility with Mac OS X)? Or IceWM?

I would say something here about senseless duplication of effort, but
it's not likely to convince anybody.

That said, if someone wanted to have a WindowMaker Desktop group in
comps, that'd be fine; it should depend on base-x though.

> On xdm theme -- if anybody is interested in this; well, 
> xorg-x11-xdm src.rpm is 400k -- it shouldn't be unfathomable for 
> interested geek to fix it and maintain it (and I would be glad to 
> meet you, because xdm bugs in bugzilla are always for me, desktop 
> team bugmaster, kind of nightmare).

Please, just pretend xdm doesn't exist.

I wish we had a way to mark packages as actively deprecated.  I don't
want to orphan xdm, I want that no one work on it ever again.

- ajax