Overview: ~~~~~~~~ The X.Org Foundation has finally changed X11 to install itself into the /usr heirarchy by default instead of the /usr/X11R6 hierarchy. The basic rationale is that with modern packaging systems like rpm, deb, etc., there is no need to isolate the X Window System into its own private hierarchy on the filesystem. Originally, the /usr/X11R6 directory was intended to strictly be the location where X11R6 itself would get installed. Over time however various other 3rd party software packages, addons and other stuff has infiltrated into the /usr/X11R6 heirarchy for no really good reason, and some of it still sits in there today. A year or two ago, I knew this change would be coming in the future, and sent out email to inform other package maintainers that they should update their packages to install their files in FHS compliant directories instead of abusing the /usr/X11R6 heirarchy. I'm not sure how many people actually listened though, so we're about to find out. ;o) What's changing specifically: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ X.Org X11 will no longer use the /usr/X11R6 directory hierarchy at all. It uses /usr, and installs files where you'd expect them to be found within that heirarchy more or less (although it is a bit buggy in this regard currently, that'll be fixed prior to X11R7's final release). The libraries, binaries, fonts, config files, data files - everything is moving. Along with this upstream X.Org change, there will be a number of backward compatibility issues that we'll face, where we may need to provide backward compatible symlinks for cases like applications hard coding the path to X binaries instead of using "which <appname>" and similar. We'll be keeping an eye on such issues and considering where we should provide compatibility links. What we'd like volunteers to help with: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1) A lot of existing Fedora Core, Fedora Extras and other 3rd party packages currently install themselves into /usr/X11R6, need to be updated to install themselves in a more appropriate location under /usr, using %{_datadir} and friends in their rpm specfiles. Volunteers are needed who are willing to take on the task of reporting bugs against the offending packages, and preferably also attaching patches to fix the rpms. 2) A number of packages might have shell scripts, .desktop files, or other things with hard coded paths to binaries such as /usr/X11R6/bin/xterm, or to data files, or other files traditionally installed under /usr/X11R6. Please report bugs against these packages, and where possible, change them to use "which <appname>" instead of hard coding the path to the executable/file directly. In some cases dynamic solution might not work, so hard code the new path in that case unless there's another appropriate solution apparent. 3) If you can personally think of any application or compat problems that might occur when the changeover is made, please report them to me via email in advance, so we can try to find a solution sooner than later. This message is being sent out to encourage community involvement in the process, and to help weed out problems sooner in the development cycle than later on, as there is likely to be a fair amount of package churn, so we'd like to get things in order far far in advance of FC5test1. Thanks in advance for any feedback, and also to any volunteers who decide to help out.