3Dfx Voodoo 1 & 2 Glide Linux Driver Retired, Other X.Org Code Officially Retired

In clearing up the state of various X.Org packages that have been effectively unmaintained for years, an attempt is being made to better communicate the status of some "retired" X.Org packages that Linux distributions should work towards removing as they are no longer being maintained.

Alan Coopersmith at Oracle who has done much of the X.Org release wrangling over the years and occasionally releasing minor X.Org driver updates for old/vintage hardware has been preparing a new announcement that spells out the current retired state of some X.Org packages to better clear things up with various Linux distributions / package maintainers. Coopersmith has long done this as part of packaging X.Org for Solaris while also being a longtime X.Org upstream contributor and one of the few still working to help maintain the X.Org packages.

Details can be found via this mailing list post. Below is the current draft of the announcement to Linux distribution maintainers barring any minor changes to come in the days ahead.

The X.Org packages that are "retired" and now in an archive-only state without any further upstream work includes:

"app/lbxproxy & lib/liblbxutil:
Support for the required LBX extension to X11 was disabled by default in xorg-server 1.1 (May 2006) and removed in 1.2 (January 2007).

app/luit:
X.Org stopped maintaining our fork and encourages use of Thomas Dickey's from http://invisible-island.net/luit/ instead.

app/proxymngr, app/xfindproxy, app/xfwp
X.Org has deprecated the X11 Proxy Management Protocol and related tools, in favor of using SSH's X11 tunneling instead.

app/xdbedizzy:
This was a simple demo of the Double Buffer Extension (DBE), not a useful program.

app/xditview:
While X.Org hasn't deprecated this yet, you may still be better off using the gxditview fork that's part of the GNU groff package instead.

app/xrx:
Most browsers ended support for the old Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) several years ago. Even before that, using a browser plugin for remote display of an embedded X11 application never really caught on.

app/xsetmode:
Replaced by: xinput --set-mode "device name" ABSOLUTE https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/xsetmode/-/blob/master/README

app/xsetpointer:
Doesn't work with xorg-server 1.4 (Sept. 2007) and later https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/xsetpointer/-/blob/master/README

app/xtrap & lib/libXTrap:
This was a proposed extension for X11R5, replaced by the XTEST & RECORD extensions in X11R6 (released in 1994). The server side was removed in xorg-server 1.6 (Feb. 2009).

driver/xf86-input-*:
Almost all of these are retired now - the only ones still supported are:
For Linux: xf86-input-libinput & xf86-input-evdev
For non-Linux: xf86-input-keyboard & xf86-input-mouse
For all platforms: xf86-input-elographics, xf86-input-joystick, xf86-input-synaptics, xf86-input-vmmouse, & xf86-input-void

driver/xf86-video-glide:
This was a driver for 3Dfx Voodoo 1 & 2 boards from the late 1990's, using the Glide API.

font/bitstream-speedo:
Support for the Speedo font format was disabled by default in X11R6.8 (Sept. 2004), and removed in libXfont 1.4.0 (Feb. 2009)

lib/liboldX:
This provided backwards compatibility for apps from X Version 10, which was the version of the X Window System from November 1985, replaced by X11 in September 1987. 35 years seems like more than long enough to port applications to using libX11 instead.

lib/libXevie:
The server side of XEvIE was removed in xorg-server 1.6 (Feb. 2009). GNOME's at-spi2-core used libXevie starting in August 2003, but that code was disabled by default in 2015 for the 2.20.0 release, and then removed altogether in the 2.26.0 release in 2017.

lib/libXfontcache:
The server side of the FontCache extension was disabled by default in X11R6.8.0 (Sep. 2004) and was removed in xorg-server 1.6 (Feb. 2009).

lib/libxkbui:
The only known consumer of this library was the xorgcfg utility, which was disabled by default in xorg-server 1.4 (Sep. 2007) and removed in xorg-server 1.6 (Feb. 2009).

lib/libXxf86misc:
The server side of the XFree86-Misc extension was removed in xorg-server 1.6 (Feb. 2009).


(This not a complete list - you can find more listed under https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/groups/xorg/-/archived or marked Obsolete in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/doc/xorg-docs/-/blob/master/MAINTAINERS I've just listed those which still show up with a fair number of entries on https://repology.org/ as still being in distros.)"

Additionally, there are plans to retire libdmx soon for the Xdms server that was dropped from the xorg-server source tree in 2021 and libXp as the Xprt server that was removed from the X.Org Server back in 2009.

More details on the FreeDesktop.org Gitlab.