Bill Nottingham wrote:
These are libraries not required by anything. Note that I'm treating perl modules as libraries in this case. liboldX
In all honesty, I don't think anything out there uses this library in Linux, and probably nothing ever has. I've never seen or heard of anything using it anyway. Ancient legacy, and can probably just be dropped entirely from the OS.
libxkbui libXvMC libXxf86dga
[SNIP]
libxkbui is required only by fontforge, in Extras. libXxf86dga is required by various things in Extras.
These are core X Window System libraries, and are expected to be there. Various 3rd party software uses and relies upon these libraries. They can't IMHO be removed from Core. Also, the maintenance of the X Window System as a whole, while modularized, is not done one package as a time. There is a fair bit of automation being done to update libraries, drivers, and keep everything in synchronization, and rolling with upstream changes. Splitting things into 2 different piles, which are maintained separately, with 2 different build systems, etc. would be a major maintenance nightmare. Nothing is really to be gained by pushing these small libraries into Fedora Extras IMHO, except complicating maintenance of X. Having said that, there are a number of packages that are part of the full X Window System release which are not currently part of Fedora Core, and unlike the libraries, are prime candidates for possible inclusion in Fedora Extras. A number of the old legacy X applications, some of which we haven't shipped for many releases now, can potentially be maintained in Extras if there are volunteers who are interested in maintaining them. There are a few other things which are lesser used software previously part of X11R6-contrib a number of years back, which interested volunteers may want to maintain in extras. I'll post a list of them all sometime after Christmas, and see if anyone is interested in any of the bits and pieces. I believe many users will be happy to see some of these lesser used tools made available via Extras now, which is made easily possible thanks to modularization of X. HTH -- Mike A. Harris, Open Source Advocate * http://mharris.ca Proud to be Canadian.
