Interest in having your ports in a downstream FreeBSD distro

[pkgdemon]

@b-aaz I wanted to reach out, and see if you are interested in contributing your ports to a FreeBSD downstream distro? I couldn't find anything on phabricator, or mailing lists for FreeBSD. Will you be making an effort to contribute this to upstream? Let me know if you need help. I would like to see this project succeed, and help to get the status updated here https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/wiki/Are-We-XLibre-Yet%3F .

[pkgdemon]

My thought was we can get you some unstable packages building, so your ports updates get automatic packages, CI, and ISOs.

[b-aaz]

@b-aaz I wanted to reach out, and see if you are interested in contributing your ports to a FreeBSD downstream distro? I couldn't find anything on phabricator, or mailing lists for FreeBSD. Will you be making an effort to contribute this to upstream? Let me know if you need help. I would like to see this project succeed, and help to get the status updated here https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/wiki/Are-We-XLibre-Yet%3F .

Yes I'm Interested!
And yes I do want this to be merged into the upstream, but I do not think it's ready yet, and that's why I haven't made any requests for merger with the main ports tree.
This is a big change, and has lots of inter-dependencies with other ports, so I just want to be sure that everything works fine before a merge request.
There is a a CI system here (thanks to @probonopd) that creates a pkg repo with the binaries on each successful build, here is the index, you can add it as a repo to pkg and install the binaries.

One thing that is still in the TODOs is making all of the other ports with dependencies on xorg-server have an option for choosing XLibre instead.

[pkgdemon]

Hi @b-aaz, Thank you for getting back to me. I have permission from GhostBSD project to help with this in anyway I can. I am the GhostBSD port maintainer for the Gershwin Desktop environment which is a DE I have been working on since 2022, and they are allowing me to package it within GhostBSD.

I have discussed with GhostBSD and when you are ready to take the next steps we can offer the following:

A branch main-xlibre for you to push your ports to, and you can customize Mk files and all ports in this branch however you need.

I can construct a pipeline in GhostBSD jenkins to create Unstable Xlibre repo from this branch that will build all ports with XLibre as the default X Server. Xorg will still continue be available to GhostBSD users, this just establishes another full set of packages. You can have a full hosted package full / incremental build anytime your PRs to ports are approved. When critical packages build packages will be synced to mirrors.

I can modify ghostbsd-build to construct a pipeline in GhostBSD jenkins to create Unstable Xlibre Mate, XFCE, and Gershwin ISOs. This will get triggered by critical packages building successfully and being pushed to mirrors.

If you are interested we can keep discuss here or I am available on the GhostBSD Contributors Telegram channel which is my preferred method. Others in the GhostBSD project are also interested in helping with this this effort. I also can be reached on XLibre telegram, or Libera on IRC.

[b-aaz]

This is great, thank you!
I'm in!
The CI system looks absolutely great.

One thing that is really needed now, is testing.
There are some rough edges in the upstream that need to get rounded on FreeBSD and it's distros.

Sadly I have left Telegram for a time, but I think this thread is good enough.

Again this means a lot, Thanks!

[b-aaz]

Till now I have have intentionally not touched the ports and files outside of the XLibre ports, I think now it is time to change that.
All of the other ports that depend on xorg-server should be modified to now and have a option to depend on xlibre-server instead.

I'll start testing this here and see how it turns out, then I think we can start moving to the GhostBSD branch :) .

[pkgdemon]

Sounds good. We can definitely help with more CI, packaging, and testing. I have created the branch here to start:

https://github.com/ghostbsd/ghostbsd-ports/tree/main-xlibre

Whenever you are ready to make any PRs just let me know. I can get them approved/merged, and kick off a pipeline for it.

[probonopd]

fwiw, I have been running XLibre with the packages from this repo for a day now. Everything went smooth for me. Framework Mainboard w/ Intel 11gen built in graphics.

[b-aaz]

I'm kinda stuck on this one... .
I have started working on the ports outside of my tree that depend on xorg-server.
pkg rquery %rn xorg-server on the FreeBSD repos list these:
These ports are currently unavailable to xlibre-server users because of conflict between xlibre-server and xorg-server.

nvidia-driver
nvidia-driver-304
nvidia-driver-340
nvidia-driver-390
nvidia-driver-470
nvidia-driver-devel
slim
xf86-input-egalax
xf86-input-elographics
xf86-input-evdev
xf86-input-joystick
xf86-input-keyboard
xf86-input-libinput
xf86-input-mouse
xf86-input-synaptics
xf86-input-vmmouse
xf86-input-void
xf86-input-wacom
xf86-video-amdgpu
xf86-video-ast
xf86-video-ati
xf86-video-dummy
xf86-video-intel
xf86-video-mga
xf86-video-nv
xf86-video-qxl
xf86-video-scfb
xf86-video-vesa
xf86-video-vmware
xorg-minimal
xorgxrdp
xorgxrdp-devel

Removing the drivers that have XLibre ports we have the following list:

nvidia-driver
nvidia-driver-304
nvidia-driver-340
nvidia-driver-390
nvidia-driver-470
nvidia-driver-devel
slim
xf86-input-egalax
xf86-video-scfb
xorg-minimal
xorgxrdp
xorgxrdp-devel

Now these ports should be modified to be "installable" when xlibre-server is installed while not making them unavailable to xorg-server users too.
The solutions that I see are:

• Making 2 ports from each of these one with a dependency on xlibre-server, one on xorg-server.
• Making them have a radio option for dependency on xlibre-server or xorg-server.

Non of the above options look really good to me. Particularly when the overarching meta-ports also come into the play. but maybe I'm over-complicating all this and there is a simpler option.

So I need some help and your opinions on this!

[pkgdemon]

I thought at least in the case of xf86 drivers xlibre was forking those as well, so we would want ports for those as those will change?

https://github.com/X11Libre/xf86-video-vmware

[pkgdemon]

Sorry I dd not mean to close ticket I pressed enter too fast.

[b-aaz]

at least in the case of xf86 drivers xlibre was forking those as well, so we would want ports for those as those will change?

XLibre only forked the xf86 drivers that were in X.Org, xf86-video-scfb and xf86-input-egalax are 3rd party drivers.

There are xlibre-* ports for the xf86 drivers that XLibre forked from X.Org the question is what should be done with the other 3rd party drivers and misc software that depends on xorg-server.

[probonopd]

This is what Perplexity has to say on the subject - take it with a grain of salt.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/in-freebsd-ports-and-packages-N1wZ_wDcQzqUx8dlDto9sA

[pkgdemon]

I would guess this xorg-cat.mk would have to be cloned to xlibre-cat.mk and xorg.mk to xlibre.mk then both of those adjusted to accommodate for all of the xlibre ports.

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/blob/main/Mk/Uses/xorg-cat.mk#L120

From there maybe each port has a condition for USES if that can be done allowing either to be selected? Then something like poudriere can be configured to make all ports use either USES = xlibre or USES=xorg depending on the set. I will look at little further but there are just my quick thoughts.