[oi-dev] X packages to deprecate

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 08/27/16 04:40 AM, Aurélien Larcher wrote:
> Are we able to simply and effectively deprecate these packages or are
> there issues to foresee?

You can probably guess my opinion based on how many of them I've already
obsoleted in  https://hg.java.net/hg/solaris-x11~x-s12-clone/ but since
others asked what these do, I can provide some background.

> pkg:/compatibility/packages/SUNWxwinc at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0
> pkg:/compatibility/packages/SUNWxwman at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0
> pkg:/compatibility/packages/SUNWxwopt at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0
> pkg:/compatibility/packages/SUNWxwplr at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0
> pkg:/compatibility/packages/SUNWxwplt at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0
> pkg:/compatibility/packages/SUNWxwpmn at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0
> pkg:/compatibility/packages/SUNWxwslb at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0

These were a transition aid for our package refactoring, when we
went from "Put all the headers for all libraries in SUNWinc,
all the libraries & programs in SUNWplt, all the man pages for
all the programs in SUNWxwman and for all the libraries in SUNWxwpmn"
to following the upstream groupings & IPS model of keeping headers,
man pages, etc. with the software they are for, to allow people
following S10 instructions or using SVR4 packages with old
dependencies to get the same sets of files those used to provide.

I've not deleted them mostly because they're low cost - there's
little to maintain as they're just dependencies on other packages,
but someday the transition will probably end.

> pkg:/library/motif/libdpstkxm at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0

This lets you use DPS (see below) in a Motif application.
Two ancient bits mixed together makes something far more obscure!
I have no idea if anything ever used it.

> pkg:/system/kernel/hardware-cursor at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0

This module provides hardware cursor acceleration for Xsun on SPARC fb
drivers.  It's actually a clever little streams module you push on the
mouse stream that causes it to update the cursor directly on the fb driver,
all without ever leaving the kernel to context switch in the X server.
But cleverness isn't useful if you have nothing to use it with, so we
dropped it once Xsun was gone.

> pkg:/x11/compatibility/links-svid at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0

Long long ago, Sun put all of X in /usr/openwin.
The System V Interface Definition standard needed a vendor independent path,
so said to use /usr/X and allowed Sun to make it a symlink to /usr/openwin.

> pkg:/x11/library/dps at 7.5,5.11-2013.0.0.0

This is the Display Postscript (DPS) client library for old software written
to use this X11 extension.   Unless you're displaying to an ancient server
like Xsun that has this deeply proprietary extension, all it does today is
let your software run without complaining the library is missing and query
the server to find the extension isn't there.

Removing this breaks the ancient OpenWindows AnswerBook display tool that
was obseleted by "point a web browser at docs.sun.com" 2 decades ago, and
the Java SE runtime environment for Java 1.4 and before.   Preventing people
from running Java code that hasn't gotten security patches since 2008 seems
like a public service to me.

> pkg:/x11/library/libowconfig at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0

This reads and writes config files for the Xsun server.
If you ever ship the openXsun sources I released shortly before OpenSolaris.org
died you need it, if not, you don't.

> pkg:/x11/library/toolkit/libxaw4 at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0
> pkg:/x11/library/toolkit/libxaw5 at 0.5.11,5.11-2013.0.0.0

These provide backwards binary compatibility for Xaw apps compiled on older
Solaris releases - libXaw4 for those built on Solaris 2.2 or prior (yes,
1992ish), libXaw5 for those build on Solaris 2.3 through 10.

libXaw7 is the current version of this, introduced to OpenSolaris in 2008.

> pkg:/x11/network/rstart at 1.0.3,5.11-2013.0.0.0

This is an old solution for using rsh to start X11 apps remotely.
It was superseded by "ssh -X" in the mid-90's.

> pkg:/x11/network/x11-network-proxies at 7.5,5.11-2013.0.0.0

This package contains the lbxproxy, xfwp, xfindproxy, and proxymngr utilities
for proxying the X11 protocol over low-bandwidth connections or through a firewall.

Over a decade ago, Keith Packard & Jim Gettys compared lbxproxy to ssh with
X11 Forwarding & Compression and found ssh provided equivalent or better
performance and latency to lbxproxy, and concluded:
   "LBX does not solve either the authentication and security problems that
    SSH solves. We saw little evidence of LBX ever helping. At least as
    implemented, LBX looks to have been a bad idea."
    - http://keithp.com/~keithp/talks/usenix2003/

As a result X.Org deprecated LBX and dropped support for it from Xorg 1.2
and later releases, so the Xorg servers in Solaris 10 & later do not have
any LBX support, only older servers like Xsun do.   I've never seen anyone
use the others, since SSH X11 tunneling is far easier to setup and more secure.

	-alan-