Why X is needed (was: Re: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee It's Not 1970! (or is it?))

[Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo]

Robert, I think you are a little confused about the includsion of X in
LSB. What is required is libX11, libXext, libSM, libICE, libXt, and
libGL (at least at this time). On my system, the .so files for these
libraries (and their dependencies, excluding libc) totals 2,691,068
bytes. That's just a smidge over 2 and a half MB, nowhere near the 50
you fear is necessary. Yes, a full install of XFree86 will take up 50
megs or more, but this includes one or more X servers, xterms, window
managers, multiple client applications, etc.

We require these basic X libraries because ISV's want to sell
graphical apps. A driving force behind LSB is making it easy for ISV's
to create a single version of a program that will run on multiple
distributions, provided they conform to LSB. It is in the best
interest of LSB to make sure that ISV's can make graphical
applications. At 2.5 MB (from XFree86 3.3.6 and Mesa 3.1), this is
hardly a burden to distribution makers.

Heck, in a tarball, these libraries fit on a floppy disk with room
left over, so it even seems possible that something like Tom's Root
Boot set could include them to unpack onto a ramdrive and provide a
fully LSB compliant system with very limited permanent storeage space.

-- 
Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo - jkaivo at ndn.net - http://jakob.kaivo.net/