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The situation with XCB

So, as soon as XCB was in Portage I did give it a try… unfortunately Kaffeine refused to work as intended so I had to get away from it because I really need it working during the day (I play movies or films almost all day long when I’m trying to concentrate on a problem).

Now I was thinking of getting more seriously at it to find the issue, but I don’t want to break Enteprise… so I wanted to get it working on Prakesh… unfortunately xorg-server failed because libxcb does not state correctly its dependency over pthread.

I’ve now fixed the issue, or at least I hope so, but one question is still on my mind. Eric Anholt is an active Xorg developer, and a FreeBSD developer, why doesn’t he maintain the sources in sync? Why he’s more apt to workaround the stuff in Ports rather than fixing it for good in the sources? When modular X was in its first betas, I’ve been trying to report the issues with it on FreeBSD, and I was just dismissed with “Gentoo/FreeBSD is not supported, go play with your hacks somewhere else” kind of approach… after a few months I waited there, Anholt stumbled across the same errors and fixed them almost in the same way.

I wonder why people still consider us a problem rather than an help, especially considering that in the past year and a half we helped making more than a few projects FreeBSD-aware… PulseAudio for instance is now fully operational on FreeBSD from the repository as I’ve been working on porting it; D-Bus is now having more momentum on FreeBSD directly upstream, thanks to Timothy, Steev, Cardoe and J5; Binutils now supports FreeBSD’s ld-elf and static SPARC64 and AMD64 binaries; we even fixed a few bugs in FreeBSD sources themselves (in particular 6.2_beta3 release has two kernel patches prepared by Alex and Javier)… and we’re still considered harmful?

Comments 3
  1. Hi Diego,Thanks for the XCB patch. We like to see patches from people.If you notice anything again let us know. Your help is much appreciated.

  2. Diego, you know, there are reasons why Linux is so popular and the BSDs aren’t. And it has a lot to do with the attitude of the developers… I still don’t understand why you have so much interest in the BSDs.

  3. Probably just for what you said :)BSDs aren’t inferior when it comes to code, actually I find them cleaner than Linux and GNU software most of the times – of course they have their quirks too – but the main issue with them is the low friendliness of ports and of the developers.I try to keep an open mind and be as friendly as I can, and I try to let the code live and get what its deserves, even with that kind of developers around :)Of course, it’s easier to do with FreeBSD, whose developers have at least some general common sense, than with OpenBSD, whose developers are fiercely hated among a lot of projects 😛

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