[Xr] small adjustments

[Carl Worth]

On Jul 7, Bill Spitzak wrote:
 > I have not been sucessful in getting Xr to compile without Xrender.

The work has not yet been done to make this possible. That work is
near the top of my list of tasks to do for Xr. Of course,
contributions would be welcome.

 > However the programs don't link because they want many functions
 > from Xft.

The dependency on Xft is really just a temporary hack to draw some
text on the screen. Work is in progress to have real text support in
Xr, and when that is complete the dependency on Xft will go away.

 > All in all a rather frustrating experience.

I can appreciate your frustration. As I said in a previous email, it
would be beneficial to have a system such as GAR to aid in the process
of compiling the many libraries that make up this system.

 > This is exactly the sort of stuff people complain about with Linux. There is 
 > no reason for this mess. To the average programmer there should be ONE 
 > library to draw things. Thoug to be charitable I can see an excuse to put 
 > Freetype into it's own library. Would it be possible to gather fontconfig, 
 > Xrender, Xr, Xft, libpiximage, and all this other stuff and make
 > ONE library?

There are actually good reasons for the separation of each library
mentioned above. It would not be feasible nor beneficial to combine
them.

As for your "average programmer" that considers this a mess, such a
programmer should wait patiently until Xr appears pre-compiled with
all of its dependent libraries within his/her favorite
distribution. At that point, it will be as simple as installing a
"single" Xr package in order to draw things.

-Carl