I noticed at SourceForge that Fink has announced the availability of 
KDE for Mac OS X. First I should congratulate all the hard working 
KDE-Darwin and Fink developers!

My concern is that I noticed that Fink has started to distribute 
libXv and libXinerama as dynamic shared libraries in its unstable 
version of XFree86. In fact, these libraries are required for KDE 
according to the documentation. This is a Bad Idea(TM). These 
libraries are not distributed shared on any platform(*) and it can 
cause a highly undesirable divergence for application developers or 
porters to start linking to them (and then relying on them) as shared 
libraries. Currently the Darwin version of XFree86 follows exactly 
with other platforms in its X11 libraries and we should not move away 
from this.

In any case, libraries that are not distributed as shared libraries 
are distributed this way for a reason. In the case of libXinerama it 
is distributed only static for backwards compatibility. For libXv, 
the maintainer has strong feelings that it should not be distributed 
shared because it the API is not stable enough. It has changed many 
times with different XFree86 distributions and a shared library 
presumes the API is more or less stable.

My understanding is that the KDE-Darwin porters have had troubles 
configuring things to work without libXinerama and libXv as shared 
libraries. Making them shared libraries as a short term hack is one 
thing. However, we should make sure that we solve the underlying 
configuration problem before people starting building apps using 
these shared libraries that will ever afterwards rely on them being 
present.

--Torrey

(*) It is true that one version of Red Hat did include a shared 
version of libXv. The Red Hat maintainer of XFree86 has since 
apologized, but it does leave them in a tricky situation.

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