XFree86 spec file for develoment snapshots ?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Thomas Dodd wrote:

>> I currently do not have a 4.3.99.x src.rpm, however I have been 
>> fairly slowly working on one for about a week.  I don't have a 
>> lot of time to devote to it for about 2-3 weeks, so while waiting 
>> for a build to compile and whatnot, I've been test building 
>> 4.3.99.x on another machine and getting rid of patches one at a 
>> time that are no longer needed.  The bigger part of the work will 
>> be forward porting patches that are still needed, and isolating 
>> small pieces of patches that are mostly unneeded, but which a few 
>> bits are still needed.
>
>I think he was asking for more of a easy to remove build of the CVS 
>tree. No RedHat patches. Just what you get if you downloaded and did 
>make world, but that was then used as an RPM payload. That allows easier 
>installation, and removal (when it breaks).

I wish you, or anyone good luck finding anything like that
anywhere.  Even better luck spending the time to create it.  ;o)  
The funny part is, that I'm more likely to have rawhide rpms of
4.3.99.x before someone produced sane rpms themselves, and i can
reasonably guarantee mine will be much saner.  ;o)

>Perhaps with a minimal set of patches to fit the Red Hat/Fedora layout.
>Not sure ny more, but there used to be some differeces in the XF86 and 
>Red Hat directory structure. XF86 didn't use /etc/X11/ for everything 
>Red Hat did. I think font locations too.

Red Hat does not have a Red Hat/Fedora layout, but rather, we use
the File Heirarchy Standard locations for X11.  Any Linux OS
distribution out there which does not put the X11 files in the 
locations they are in Red Hat Linux, is not FHS and thus also not 
LSB compliant.

http://www.pathname.com/fhs
http://www.linuxbase.org

XFree86 itself however, is not a piece of Linux-only software, 
but rather it is portable to pretty much any relevant operating 
system out there, and even many irrelevant ones.  Each of those 
OSs have their own standards for things.  Also, I've no idea if 
the XFree86.org supplied Linux binaries follow the FHS or LSB 
standards or not.

What matters to us however, is the FHS and LSB, not random 
upstream projects own personal preferences for where they think 
their files should go.


>This is kind of what the current 2.6 kernels from Arjan do. Alan
>added a rpm target to the kerenl somtime back as well, but I
>think it was more generic than what Arjan is doing. Several
>packages include their own spec file already, but XF86 isn't one
>of them.

Someone could create a generic XFree86 spec file that contained
no patches, however it would still need to be updated every
single release, and well maintained.  It would be highly
distribution specific, and almost certainly never considered for
inclusion in XFree86 itself.

Feel free to produce rpms of XFree86 CVS based upon my 4.3.0 rpms 
if you (or anyone else) wishes.  If nothing else, you'll become 
very familiar with building XFree86 rpms, and the complexities 
and problems that are involved, and with any luck, I can sucker 
you (or anyone else interested) into fixing bugs.  ;o)



-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat