Comments on bug 140214 - the removal of X utilities?

[Bryan Ischo]

>
> 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.

My point was simply that it was more work than leaving them in would have
been.  This is in response to your previous assertion that one of the
reasons for doing this work was to avoid the work of maintaining these
programs.  You have yet to demonstrate that maintaining these programs has
taken any work whatsoever, and any work at all to add the rm -rf commands
is still MORE work than the zero work of not doing it.

The small amount of work that Mike A. Harris had to do to remove these
programs is unfortunately multiple orders of magnitude less work than
anyone else will have to do to repackage these programs.

>> 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.

What's crazy is that the current x11-xorg RPM is still *building* these
programs, it's just not including them in the package.  Why?  Because it
is probably a real pain to modify the X11 makefiles to *not* build these
programs just when the Fedora team doesn't want them to be built.

So what you're suggesting be done is to create a secondary SRPM, which is
virtually identical to the original one, building all the programs in the
same way that the original one does, including all of the 52 MB of source
code associated with the X.org release, *except* that the set of programs
that it actually installs is simply the "opposite" of those installed by
the original RPM - whereas the original installs everything except these
couple of utility programs, this new RPM would install nothing except
these couple of utility programs.

And this RPM would then probably become completely outdated once the X.org
team reorganizes their software according to what they suggest will happen
with X11R7.

You still think this makes sense?

> 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."

That's fine.  If at the time that X.org reorganized their source tree,
and/or the sources for these programs are removed, then it would make
sense for someone to take ownership of that source as a separate project
and maintain their own RPMs for them.  And it would be perfectly
reasonable to discuss with the X.org people their plans to remove these
programs from their software base and how users who still might want them
can take over ownership of them.

What does not make sense to me is for Fedora to decide ahead of time,
*before X11R7 is released*, to do their own arbitrary removal of these
programs, in a way that forces anyone who still wants to use them with
Fedora to use the onerous mechanisms that I just described.

So it's only a 52 MB download potentially.  Big deal, right?  Just because
the download size is not unreasonable by *your* definition doesn't mean
that it isn't completely crazy to have to download 52 MB just to build
100K of programs, and all of this work could easily have been avoided if
Mike A. Harris hadn't decided to remove these things without a clear plan
of how to make them available to people who were still using them.

> 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.

It does matter if they are part of the source or separate.  At the time
they are separated it makes sense for Fedora to package them as separate
RPMs, or not package them at all and leave it up to users to maintain an
extras package for them.  As long as they are part of the X.org source, it
makes sense to leave them in the Fedora packages, as my numerous and
voluminous arguments here have demonstrated.

As a side note, what's really funny is that looking at the xorg-x11 SPEC
file, one can see that only *some* of these "legacy" programs have been
removed - xmessage is still retained, *even though ALL of your arguments
and Mike A. Harris' unspoken but assumed arguments say that this program
should be removed as well*.  So obviously they're not even applying
whatever principles that you and they espouse consistently - which makes
the reasons for removing *an arbitrary subset* of these programs even less
compelling.  Apparently xmessage was "important" enough to be added back
in "upon request (#131076)", but xbiff and the others were not.

It is very frustrating that my arguments, as sound as they are, are not
deemed "important" to Mike A. Harris, whereas someone else's arbitrary
request to have their program included is granted, despite the fact that
this violates all of the arguments that you and he seem to agree with.

Thanks,
Bryan

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Bryan Ischo             bryan at ischo.com                          N, R, 6
New York, NY, USA       http://www.ischo.com            RedHat Linux 7.3
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