Posted by
michael
on from the thanks-for-all-the-fish-screensavers dept.
Nirbo writes "FreeBSD switches to X.Org, The 'HEADSUP' can be found here, and on the -x11, -current, and -ports mailing lists. Very good news for those FreeBSD users who have either changed to X.Org in anticipation, or have been waiting in hope for this momentous change."
Portupgrade neither necessary, nor sufficient
by
wirelessbuzzers
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Too bad that you can't upgrade an existing system without using portupgrade, though. I hate to see portupgrade drifting closer and closer to being a required part of the system.
No. It says in the post:
To upgrade, you must remove your XFree86 ports and install the xorg ports. It couldn't be done with portupgrade, unfortunately, because we are keeping the XFree86 ports around.
In other words, you cannot automatically upgrade all the ports using portupgrade.
As for portupgrade becoming necessary, I don't know what you're talking about. While I use it (to keep my -CURRENT current), this is merely for convenience: I haven't seen any ports that depend on it.
-- I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Re:The lesson of X11....
by
nathanh
·
· Score: 5, Informative
But I'm curious what restrictions the XFree people added and why it caused all this ruckus. It doesn't seem to have made any difference to my ability to get the source or play with it. What am I missing?
They added an advertising clause. Similar to the old BSD license.
There's a reasonable argument that the license change by itself didn't cause the exodus. It was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. There has been friction between the XFree developers and the rest of the FLOSS community for quite some time. There has even been considerable friction within the XFree team which led to the infamous "eviction" of Keith. But until recently there haven't been any realistic alternatives to XFree.
It remains to be seen whether Xorg can deliver better than XFree. Initial signs are promising; the codebase is being broken up and autotooled, cutting edge extensions like Xcomposite are being integrated, some of the best and brightest have committed themselves to Xorg instead of XFree, the distributions are backing Xorg over XFree, and (most important of all) the Xorg developers are COMMUNICATING with the rest of freedesktop.org (eg, the projects that build upon X11/XFree/Xorg). Those changes alone are a significant improvement over XFree.
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Too bad that you can't upgrade an existing system without using portupgrade, though. I hate to see portupgrade drifting closer and closer to being a required part of the system.
No. It says in the post:
To upgrade, you must remove your XFree86 ports and install the xorg
ports. It couldn't be done with portupgrade, unfortunately, because we
are keeping the XFree86 ports around.
In other words, you cannot automatically upgrade all the ports using portupgrade.
As for portupgrade becoming necessary, I don't know what you're talking about. While I use it (to keep my -CURRENT current), this is merely for convenience: I haven't seen any ports that depend on it.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
They added an advertising clause. Similar to the old BSD license.
There's a reasonable argument that the license change by itself didn't cause the exodus. It was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. There has been friction between the XFree developers and the rest of the FLOSS community for quite some time. There has even been considerable friction within the XFree team which led to the infamous "eviction" of Keith. But until recently there haven't been any realistic alternatives to XFree.
It remains to be seen whether Xorg can deliver better than XFree. Initial signs are promising; the codebase is being broken up and autotooled, cutting edge extensions like Xcomposite are being integrated, some of the best and brightest have committed themselves to Xorg instead of XFree, the distributions are backing Xorg over XFree, and (most important of all) the Xorg developers are COMMUNICATING with the rest of freedesktop.org (eg, the projects that build upon X11/XFree/Xorg). Those changes alone are a significant improvement over XFree.