xlibs-dev Transition

Hi all,

This mail is being written to let you all know about a pending transition
underway in the Xorg packages. As many of you are probably aware, the
packaging of the X libraries underwent a previous transition so that each
library is contained within its own package. A major benefit of this from
the developer's point of view is that your package need only build-depend
on the specific libraries that it actually needs, thereby building slightly
faster and consuming less buildd resources that are shared by the whole
project.

In order to facilitate the transition, the old xlibs-dev package became a
metapackage that depended on all the libraries that it used to contain.
While many maintainers have moved on from this package, a large number
still use the xlibs-dev transitional metapackage to satisfy their build
dependencies.

The xlibs-dev package will be going away soon though. It makes no sense to
keep this package around now that sarge is out. Furthermore, this package
really won't make any sense to keep around when we move to the fully
modular tree, which is a major goal for the X Strike Force for the etch
release.

As such, if your package build-depends on xlibs-dev, you'll have update
your build-dependencies to the individual library packages or else your
package will FTBFS. Moritz Muehlenhoff has kindly written a script[0] that
will assist you in this task.

Also, an important item of note is that autoconf versions prior to 2.59a-4
mistakenly require libxt when simply using libx11, so you may need to
rework your autoconfage. If you have any questions, please feel free to
direct them to debian-x and we'll help you out as best we can.

 On behalf of the X Strike Force,
 David Nusinow

[0] http://www.inutil.org/jmm/xlibs