Hi, this is a summary of the needed steps to switch from DirectFB to X11. After some time hacking in the wild, I then looked into providing (possibly) clean patches for each package, which I've just finished.
I'd like to once again thank Josselin Mouette for the initial idea, Julien Cristau for his support, especially for the dark X side, as well as Otavio for his quick answers on IRC. There's a bunch of pkg-xorg packages that need tweaking, so that they ship udebs, namely: libdrm libfontenc libpciaccess libx11 libxau libxcb libxcomposite libxcursor libxdamage libxdmcp libxext libxfixes libxfont libxi libxinerama libxkbfile libxrandr libxrender x11-xkb-utils xft xkeyboard-config xorg-server xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-video-fbdev All of them have a pu/udeb branch in their respective git repositories with the needed tweaks. With some fixes Julien and I are still working on, some of those go away (libdrm for example is no longer needed with the new xserver-xorg-core-udeb). Another round of packages, not maintained by pkg-xorg: cairo dmz-cursor-theme (2 patches, tried to save up some space) gtk+2.0 gtk2-engines libgcrypt11 libgpg-error pango1.0 udev (maybe a single udeb could be sufficient) vte All of them have patches available there: http://people.debian.org/~kibi/patches-udebs-v1/ From a d-i point of view, some tweaks are needed below the packages/ directory: cdebconf (probably worth squashing everything) cdebconf-entropy cdebconf-terminal rootskel-gtk All of them have patches available there (packages+$foo directories): http://people.debian.org/~kibi/patches-di-v1/ I shall note versions in Build-Depends might need tweaking, depending on which actual versions the added/reworked udebs appear (I think at least one package got a new revision uploaded while I was working on my patches). To build my test image, I had to patch slightly config/amd64.cfg (partial revert of r61645) and pkg-lists/gtk-common, to enable the netboot-gtk again, and to add the needed X packages. Since there are some modules, mklibs can't really figure out where some symbols should come from, so I've used mklibs-copy thanks to the MKLIBS variable in config/common, then: make (re)build_netboot-gtk If you were to build a netboot-gtk image using DirectFB, and to compare with one using X11, one gets: DirectFB: 9191 extents written (17 MB) X11 : 11239 extents written (21 MB) Two test images for amd64 are available (with checksums and GPG signatures, same directory; the last one also has the full output of ): http://people.debian.org/~kibi/di-x11/2010-02-06/mini.iso http://people.debian.org/~kibi/di-x11/2010-02-08/mini.iso The first one was built using the udebs generated in my first wild run, and includes an additional tweak for console-setup, so that keymap selection also works within the installer. The second one was built using the udebs generated during the “clean” run, and doesn't include that tweak, since it seems we will have to discuss separately the kbd-chooser vs. console-setup issue. There's also the output of “make stats_netboot-gtk” in the same directory for that one. (Please keep in mind libraries weren't reduced for that one; IIRC we would go down from 4.7M libs to 3.3M libs.) Otavio expressed his concerns about memory usage, I've just finished an installation in Dzongkha successfully, with a VM limited to approx 128MB. It looks like 96MB weren't sufficient, but we should be able to tweak some more bits, like using a lower BPP setting for lowmem. Some things that might need thinking about: - Maybe gtk could benefit from a stripped-down flavour instead of using the 'shared' one; that might lead to depending on fewer X libraries; other patches (gtk2-engines, rootskel-gtk come to mind) might need tweaking in this case, so as to use the proper .pc file. - Maybe libgpg-error and libgcrypt11 could be replaced by libcrypto0.9.8-udeb (already used by openssh). One downside is that libcrypto0.9.8-udeb is bigger. - Maybe think of switching over from kbd-chooser to console-setup. It should work (almost) out of the box for X11 (that was at least OK with my very first image, before cleaning up my patches), while kbd-chooser would mean patching some more. And AFAICT console-setup should be able to handle both X and non-X cases. Why? - Josselin explained DirectFB was basically unmaintained, and even if he looked around for interested people, he didn't find any. And the gtk frontend was even disabled because it was too buggy (r61645). - Even if someone steps in to fix some bugs (I heard somebody has started to publish some patches recently), it might lead to a dependency on a very single person, who might vanish at any time. Going the X11 way ensures that we have a few more folks working on it on the long run. - Using X11 means using something which is daily used by mostly everyone out there. Meaning any breakage will be noticed immediately. - It just works. Mraw, KiBi.
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