The libdps and libdpstk libraries have been deprecated for several releases of the X Window System now (approximately 2 years or more), and upstream X.Org has disabled them from being built in X11R7.

Generally speaking, this is not a problem because there has never been an open source DPS server-side extension in the XFree86 or X.Org X servers[1], so the DPS functionality is generally not useful anyway, and is more or less unused - which is the primary reason it was deprecated upstream.

This change should have very small effect overall on developers at large, however it is possible that some applications in Fedora Core, Fedora Extras, or elsewhere, might have optional DPS support, and might currently have it enabled by default still. Since DPS has been publically deprecated for several years now however, it is likely there are not many applications building with DPS support by default currently.

Nonetheless, as a notice to all Fedora Core and Fedora Extras developers, and other rpm package maintainers out there, please check all of your rpm packages which link to X libraries, and examine them for build or runtime dependencies on libdps and libdpstk. If you find any such packages, have a look at their ./configure options to see if they have an option to disable DPS support. Normally this should be something like:

./configure --disable-dps

Please update your packages as soon as possible to remove the dependency on DPS, as the DPS libraries will vanish soon in rawhide, once the modular X11R7 gets integrated into our development tree.

If anyone has any questions or concerns about the obsolescence of the dps libraries, please subscribe to the xorg@lists.freedesktop.org mailing list where you may discuss any concerns to the relevant upstream X.Org developers.

Thanks in advance.

[1] The http://dps.sf.net project, was an OSS project to implement DPS support for the XFree86 server, however that code was never integrated into XFree86 nor X.Org sources, and has not to the best of my knowledge ever been shipped by many OS distributions (if any at all). The DPS project has long since been abandoned by it's primary developer, and has been dead for years now.