A Milestone In Modular

[David Nusinow <david_nusinow@verizon.net>]

On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 11:43:11PM -0500, X Strike Force SVN Repository Admin wrote:
> -3) The above seem to be the critical steps that I'm aware of right now
> -   to get the full working server install building from our repo and
> -   running in a chroot. Step 3 is to get any of the things I'm not aware
> -   of in order to acieve this goal :-)

It's true. As of this moment, you should be able to build a set of Debian
packages in a chroot and run the X server from those packages. Granted, you
currently need an ati card to do this, but I'll work on the rest of the
drivers tomorrow :-)

A major caveat includes the mesa package we currently have sitting in our
libs directory. This package works and will need to be put in to unstable
before we upload the rest of Xorg there. It can wait for now, but we'll
have to move on it at some point.

Note that these packages are *really* sloppy in the sense that I don't
fully know what's going on. The libs appear to be really clean and the
drivers are Ok from what I recall, but the -common packages are quick hacks
by me and need to be polished a lot at some point. Anyway, we can now get a
modular X server running with entirely modular packages from our svn repo.
The next step is to expand that set of packages to the entire X Window
System, including the drivers, data, missing fonts, etc. Also, organizing
the apps is going to be critical real soon now, so we may want to start
thinking about ways to split away the cpp-requiring apps from the rest of
the apps, and other such problems.

I've already thanked him a lot on irc, and in my blog, but he deserves it
again: thanks to Daniel for all the help on getting this far. It saved me
weeks worth of work, and we'll see modular Xorg in Debian all the sooner
for it.

So if you've been waiting for something runnable to play with, now's the
time. Be sure it keep it all in a chroot, since I haven't started on the
upgrade problem yet, but there's now something tangible for everyone who's
been hesitating on the sidelines :-)

 - David Nusinow