Alan CoopersmithTwenty years ago today we released X11R7, completing over a year of effort to split up the X Window System monolithic source tree into separate modules for each library, program, driver, etc. and to build it all with the GNU autotools instead of Imake. While we’ve recombined a few modules since (xorgproto instead of individual modules for each protocol definition) and are moving from the autotools to meson now, overall it wasvery successful and made it easier for us to maintain the packages we’ve kept going and to retire those we chose to let go.
matthew green@alanc as someone who maintains x for netbsd, i've been watching this the whole time. one of the larger changes to sources over time was an autoconf upgrade, that often removed upto 1MB of text from configure* etc. the meson portion is so much easier to understand (since we use our own make files here, it matters to me a lot :-).
thanks for your work.
Ariadne Conill 🐰
@alanc way to make me feel fucking old
Emil Jacobs - Collectifission@alanc 20 years ago... Time flies! I remember this release and how much of a deal it was at the time.
