[Fink-devel] Who should Provide X11 ?

[Martin Costabel]

I think this has been discussed before, but it has come up again a lot lately:

Many (most) packages that need to run under X11 have a dependency on the virtual package x11. This is not enough to make them work.

The x11 virtual package is provided by the xfree86-base package. The problem with this is that when xfree86 is compiled and installed as a result of this dependency on x11, *only* xfree86-base and as its dependency, xfree86-base-shlibs are installed. The other two packages, xfree86-rootless and its *-shlibs are not installed, although they contain the X server and without them nothing works.

So every poor beginner falls automatically into this trap. He compiles for 3 hours and then it tells him that "no X server is in your PATH". I had this myself recently on a newly installed system: "fink install scilab", 4 hours of compilation, and then it doesn't work.

Either the "Provides: x11" has to be shifted from *-base to *-rootless, or the packages that really need X11 windows and not just some of the libraries, must depend on something else, maybe another virtual package 'xserver' that is provided by xfree86-rootless (and by system-xfree86).

--
Martin





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