9:55 p.m.
Hello all, and happy new year!
A common complaint on IRC, Reddit, etc is how hard it is to get X.Org
running on Adélie. I'm working on metapackages to make X.Org much
easier to set up.
One requirement I came across that I feel warrants further discussion is
the relation between mesa-dri- drivers and xf86-video- drivers.
Right now, xf86-video-fbdev has no mesa-dri-* driver dependency. It
should likely depend on swrast. However, that brings up another key
point: xorg-server ships with the modesetting driver (equivalent to
xf86-video-modesetting). Should the X11 server pull mesa-dri-swrast
unconditionally?
This may make sense because if mesa-dri-* fails to load, it will always
try to fall back to swrast (which can at least allow the user to bring
up a desktop and try to figure out what went wrong).
However, it also means that all X.Org installations will pull in the
heavy LLVM 6 library package. Adding mesa-dri-swrast to a ppc64
computer with an otherwise-empty world (just adelie-base-posix
xorg-server) yields a difference of 72 MB (635 vs 563). If you do not
plan on using any OpenGL software (raw X11 framebuffer on modesetting
using twm, or such), this is a large waste of space... Is that really
likely, though?
Does anyone even know of anyone who uses X11 without OpenGL? If not, we
should probably add swrast to xorg-server's dependencies.
Let's discuss.
Best,
--arw
--
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org