X.org Drops Support for 20 Obsolete Libraries & Utilities

X.org developers have announced the cessation of support for some libraries, drivers, and the X Window System, meaning that updates will no longer be produced, even if vulnerabilities are detected. The repositories of these packages are now translated into archival status, which indicates the termination of the acceptance of corrections and error messages. While distributions can still provide these packages, they do so at their own risk. The packages selected for support cessation are either no longer relevant, incompatible with new versions of the X-server, or tied to outdated APIs. Although support for these packages had already been halted in previous years, this had not been explicitly announced.

The list of packages for which support has been discontinued includes driver/xf86-input-*, with the exception of XF86-input-LibinPut, XF86-Input-EVDEV, XF86-INPUT-KEYBOOD, XF86-Input-Mouse, XF86-INPUT-LOGRAPHICS, XF86-input-joystick, xf86-input-soptics, XF86-input-VMMUSE and XF86-input-VOID. Also listed are App/LBXPROXY and LIB/Liblbxutil, which are tied to the LBX expansion, which was removed from Xorg-Server 1.2 in January 2007; and app/luit, which is recommended to be replaced with its own fork. App/XfindProxy, App/Proxymngr, and App/XFWP — all of which relate to the proxy control protocol X11 Proxy Management Protocol, which is now deemed outdated, and Tunneling is used through ssh instead — are also on the list.

Other entries include App/XDBEDIZY, which is a useless DBE expansion demonstration; app/xsetmode, which has been replaced with “Xinput-set- Mode device_name Absolute”; App/XSetPointer, which doesn’t work with Xorg-Server from version 1.4 (September 2007); and App/XRX, whose plugin has lost its relevance since browsers stopped supporting NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API).

The following are also on the list: driver/XF86-Video-Glide, a 3DFX Voodoo 1 and 2 video cards driver from the 1990s; font/bitstream-speedo, whose support for Speedo fonts was disabled in 2004 and deleted in Libxfont 1.4.0 in February 2009; and Lib/Liboldx, a compatibility layer with a 10 version of the X Window System, which was replaced by version X11 in 1987. Additionally, Lib/Libxevie, Lib/Libxfontcache, Lib/Libxkbui, and Lib/L

/Reports, release notes, official announcements.