Alan Coopersmith writes:
> > Strange: you are allowed to provide SX:CE iso images with that stuff for
> > registered downloads, but registered download from the extra repository is
> > forbidden? Lawyers ;-(
>
> Unfortunately, contracts signed in the 1990's did not foresee the future of
> internet enabled package repositories or that we might someday want to
> distribute Xsun as a separate package instead of a core part of the OS.
Ok, understood.
> If I had reason to believe someone was actually interested in doing the work,
> I could release most of the sources to the Xsun binary itself - possibly even
> all of them (I haven't checked yet) - to make it usable, someone would have to
> port them to work with the current libXfont (which in the Xsun builds is
> called
> libfont.so, but that's trivial to fix). That also only covers the core
> server
> - I could even throw in the cg6 driver source, since that's already published
> as the Xsun reference driver source - all the other drivers would still be the
> closed binary blobs you have today. The biggest differences between that and
> the Sun-shipped Xsun would be change of the TrueType & Postscript font
> renderers
> from the encumbered versions to the FreeType code that Xorg uses, and the lack
> of the Display Postscript extension.
Sounds like a great offer, thanks. Unfortunately, that won't be me: I've
got far too much on my plate today and have never worked in the X11 code
base (except for having built X11R6.0 on different platforms several times
in the distant past), but perhaps someone else will show up.
Lack of driver source isn't an issue for me, though: I don't care if my jfb
driver is only available in binary form. And I doubt that DPS has seen
much use lately. Don't know about the relative quality of the font
renderers, so for me this will most likely be using the latest (snv_130)
SVR4 packages and fit them into Indiana.
> Sun wouldn't support it or ship it in our repos, but I don't see why a
> dis-encumbered version couldn't go into /contrib, though porting to a spec
> file for source juicer could be fun.
Indeed: support won't be an issue for most, and the last time we had
support calls open for graphics driver issues are years back.
Rainer
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Rainer Orth, Center for Biotechnology, Bielefeld University
