On Jun 20, 2013, at 12:13, David Favor wrote:

> As these are mutually exclusive

Not in all ports. Some ports, libraries in particular, can often be installed 
with support for both X11 and Quartz graphics.

> someone clarify the differences.
> 
> 1) It appears specifying a +quartz variant uses 
> http://xquartz.macosforge.org/ code
>   installed on a machine. Yes/No?

No, +quartz uses OS X's native Quartz graphics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)

+x11 uses X11 graphics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11

The "XQuartz" project is an unfortunately-named package. It is a collection of 
X11 software built for OS X. It provides an X11 interface for OS X. Programs 
communicate with XQuartz using the X11 interface, not the Quartz interface. 
(The Quartz interface is built into OS X and no other libraries are required to 
use it beyond those that come with OS X.)


> 2) How does http://xquartz.macosforge.org/ relate to the quartz-wm port? 
> Specifically,
>   "port install quartz-wm" + quartz-wm --version produces version 1.3.1 while 
> the
>   XQuartz site shows version 2.7.4 + the XQuartz site implies quartz-wm is 
> part of
>   it's code ("The quartz-wm window manager included with the XQuartz 
> distribution...")
> 
>   So to use latest version of XQuartz, does this require installing the .dmg 
> file
>   from the XQuartz site?

XQuartz has its own versioning scheme. "2.7.4" only tells you the version 
number of that particular XQuartz collection. It does not tell you the version 
number of quartz-wm or any of the hundreds of other parts of the X11 system 
contained within XQuartz.

Apple used to include X11 in OS X. The way they did so was to include the 
then-current version of XQuartz in OS X. But Apple seldom updated this 
throughout the life of a version of OS X so it became out of date. Users could 
elect to update their X11 manually by installing a newer version of XQuartz. 
Now, Apple has removed X11 from OS X, so if you want X11 at all, and are not 
using MacPorts, you must install XQuartz. This ensures you'll get a current 
version and not an old one.

If you are using MacPorts, then installing the xorg ports is probably better, 
since it keeps more of your software in the MacPorts system (one place to 
update all your software), and it's probably more up to date than XQuartz, 
since each component is updated in MacPorts when it's ready, instead of having 
to bundle them all into a single distribution. The XQuartz package and the xorg 
ports in MacPorts are maintained by the same person at Apple so they are the 
same software.

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