Latest news about FreeBSD/xorg
Published November 21st, 2006 in Beryl, FreeBSD, GIT, X.orgI’ve been quite lazy since I came back from EuroBSDCon. Things were in pretty bad shape when I left for Milan. The latest update of libX11 depended on libxcb which had a broken dependency on pthreads. Most xf86-input ports were broken after the latest inputproto update. I couldn’t build latest xorg-server because it required a Mesa HEAD snapshot. Some ports got outdated, some others lacked a PORTEPOCH bump, some were still categorized in x11 though they moved to x11-fonts, ...
Well, that’s what you get when you try experimental stuff. Anyway I’ve fixed most of those issues, so that anything in the git tree should be alright (except xf86-input ports besides mouse/keyboard/evdev). If you’re on IRC, you probably already know that I won’t be maintaining those ports once they reach the original ports tree. Since it’s becoming a burden to make sure all pieces fit together and stuff, I’ve also decided that I would stop updating ports after X.org 7.2 will be released (hopefully in 3 days). Once all the ports are up-to-date, I’ll focus on fixing bugs in those ports and making sure (with Kris probably) that the merge doesn’t break too much things.
I’m getting really bored with all this X.org porting work but I’ll try to deliver beryl ports at the same time so that people can benefit from their new xserver as soon as possible. Ports are still at 0.1.1 but updating to 0.1.2 shouldn’t be too hard (there are a few new ports to create). Stay tuned.
8 Responses to “Latest news about FreeBSD/xorg”
- 1 Pingback on Nov 24th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
For libxcb, I’ve prepared a patch that adds the needed pthread stubs, and it’s currently lingering on the xcb mailing list.
A part from that, XCB seems to work fine on (Gentoo/)FreeBSD.
I have a patch that makes it compile fine but there is a failing test in parse_display_negative. Not sure why.
Hi Florent,
I just want to tell you how much your work on X for FreeBSD is appreciated. I dare say, it is the application most FreeBSD Users rely on in some form or the other.
You mentioned lots of problems, where do you see these problems coming from? Linux-centric code? The build system? FreeBSD itself?
Thanks again for your work!
Thanks for your support.
Most problems were ports problems (those are fixed).
The issue with libxcb is being or has been discussed on xcb mailing list, it will be fixed in the next release (or so I hope), but it’s not critical at the moment as I’ve removed the xcb dependency for libX11.
The input drivers / xorg-server problems will be fixed soon. I’m currently downgrading some ports to match 7.2-RC2 (and then 7.2 when it’s released) making sure that everything compiles fine (see x11@ archives for more information).
Hopefully, I’ll meet the deadline I fixed myself, which is to have a ready-to-be-tested-on-pointyhat xorg-modular patch by the end of the month.
Most of the issues I know of have been fixed (mostly ports depending on devel/imake-6)
Hello Florent,
I just agree with Ulrich, when he points the importance of your work for the Freebsd community. I’m following your progress nearly since the beginning, and there’s nothing to say but: Good job ! Bravo !
I’m just wondering why there are so litte poeple involved intoo the modular X project; aren’t other developpers of the OS, or perhaps the first concerned PC-bsd teams,
interested by your work ?
Compte tenu de votre CV, et de votre nom, j’en déduis que vous êtes Français; aussi c’est en temps que compatriote (Strasbourg) que j’aimerais terminer ce petit mot d’encouragement en vous remerciant pour le travail formidable que vous faites, et en vous souhaitant beaucoup de courage pour la suite.
Well, Eric Anholt is mainly working directly in the X.org/Freedesktop Git tree, so when new distfiles are released, it means that it pretty much compiles/works on FreeBSD without any patches (which is quite cool, cause I have no X knowledge myself). Dejan Lesjak and Eric started working slowly on modular xorg ports early this year IIRC. At that time, I proposed to give a hand for the boring work. Since then Dejan has been a bit absent and Eric focused on upstream development.
Fortunately some other committers (Joel Dahl mainly, but there might be some others, I kinda lost track) and contributors (there’s some activity on #freebsd-gnome @ freenode and on freebsd-x11@ mailing list) have submitted updates and quite a lot of bug reports, so things finally moved a bit faster since late september.
I had no contact from any FreeBSD derivative project (Edit: actually, Diego works on Gentoo/FreeBSD so that’s not true :-)), not that I was waiting for it anyway. I guess their packaging system is quite different than ours (I really have no clue) so they will have a lot of work to do on their own once it’s merged in the FreeBSD ports tree.
Anyway, the work is almost finished, and it’s pretty cool to think that I’ll make a few users happy with what I’ve been spending my time on these last few months.
FR: Merci pour les encouragements
Firstly.. I would like to thank you for all your hard work.. it is much appreciated.
Second, I was wondering if you had fixed the inputproto problems which cause problems building xorg 7.2? I am trying to compile xorg 7.2 and it keeps failing on xf86-input-calcomp…. TS_Raw and TS_Scaled errors…. I can comment out offending lines to get xf86-input-calcomp to compile but other input ports fail to build as well… I believe this is related to the inputproto problems I have read about recently..
I am wondering how I can “downgrade” my inputproto package so it doesn’t cause problems… or how to get around the inputproto build problems?
Thanks,
J-Dog