Here's the LaunchAgent and LaunchDaemon distributed with XQuartz:

/Library/LaunchAgents/org.macosforge.xquartz.startx.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>org.macosforge.xquartz.startx</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/opt/X11/lib/X11/xinit/launchd_startx</string>
      <string>/opt/X11/bin/startx</string>
      <string>--</string>
      <string>/opt/X11/bin/Xquartz</string>
    </array>
    <key>Sockets</key>
    <dict>
      <key>org.macosforge.xquartz:0</key>
      <dict>
        <key>SecureSocketWithKey</key>
        <string>DISPLAY</string>
      </dict>
    </dict>
    <key>ServiceIPC</key>
    <true/>
    <key>EnableTransactions</key>
    <true/>
  </dict>
</plist>

/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macosforge.xquartz.privileged_startx.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
  <dict>
    <key>Label</key>
    <string>org.macosforge.xquartz.privileged_startx</string>
    <key>ProgramArguments</key>
    <array>
      <string>/opt/X11/lib/X11/xinit/privileged_startx</string>
      <string>-d</string>
      <string>/opt/X11/lib/X11/xinit/privileged_startx.d</string>
    </array>
    <key>MachServices</key>
    <dict>
      <key>org.macosforge.xquartz.privileged_startx</key>
      <true/>
    </dict>
    <key>TimeOut</key>
    <integer>120</integer>
    <key>EnableTransactions</key>
    <true/>
  </dict>
</plist>

This is now feature complete. I've confirmed the following:

• The installer script works
• Launching XQuartz.app directly works
• Starting Xquartz via launching an X app works
• Xft fonts work
• Font caching works
• glxgears works
• Fonts look goddamn gorgeous

I'm now using this xquartz package instead of the macosforge installer, and it works great.

@jwiegley @viric @vcunat (and any other interested parties):

Can I have you take a look at this? If I did everything correctly, it shouldn't impact Linux/NixOS (maybe some rebuilds due to extra empty environment variables on those platforms, but nothing more).

Here's a teaser (xterm):

And here's iTerm for comparison:

:)

Looks well-separated, and quite a lot of work, too.

I know very little about darwin and less about XQuartz, but what is the purpose of mesa there? It is (transitively) used by many other packages, as they need libGL_. At build time it's probably fine to use the newly added mesa-darwin, but during runtime I would expect to prefer the native /usr/lib/libGL_ on the machine, just as on NixOS we use the one from the chosen GPU driver.

@vcunat Thank you for reviewing this. In XQuartz's case, it seems to just be a build time dependency - it isn't dynamically linked to mesa. As for the other cases, I'm not really sure how they might be used on Darwin. (The mesa-darwin package was a pretty direct port from the MacPort's Portfile.)

Would you/someone try at least running glxgears from glxinfo? I don't even know if such things worked before, but it would be better not to break them.

@vcunat Aside from a vboxvideo related error message (I ran glxinfo in a VM), it appears to be working:

https://gist.github.com/cstrahan/4874bc101b960486175e

A darwin inside VM surprised me, but it's probably almost identical to real darwin. BTW, that mentioned driver is in vbox guest additions (at least on Linux).

@vcunat Oops - you wanted me to run that on Darwin! That works too:

https://gist.github.com/cstrahan/fb18eed11dfa9b54e002

OpenGL version string: 2.1 NVIDIA-8.24.13 310.90.9.05f01

Yes, looks like it's picking the system driver.

I'm quite confident that linux is unaffected by this (just added -p to mkdir in xkeyboardconfig), but I have no idea about what it can break on darwin (and I never had any darwin). I think it might be best to create a separate darwin-only jobset for this on Hydra, so at least builds are tested and binaries provided for potential testers, before actually merging. I have no Hydra permissions to do this, however. @shlevy: still interested in darwin?

@vcunat

I think it might be best to create a separate darwin-only jobset for this on Hydra, so at least builds are tested and binaries provided for potential testers, before actually merging.

That sounds like an excellent approach. If we can get a jobset configured, I'd be more than happy to tackle any failures. Thanks again for diving into this, I know it's a non-trivial PR to wade through.

I just gave this one last self-review, and I found that there was an error logged in /var/log/system.log mentioning that fc-cache couldn't find the default font config file. I had to export FONTCONFIG_FILE in the script that the privileged daemon invokes. I made that change and fixed a couple copy-paste errors in commit cstrahan@7c7308d.

Per @shlevy, this is pending the merge of other Darwin fixes in staging.

I've rebased this onto current master. @shlevy can I have your or @jwiegley merge this, perhaps (now that staging is merged)?

This is all working for me, so I'm going to pull the trigger now.

I guess the comments linked below are just forgotten and can be deleted (will be on regeneration): https://github.com/cstrahan/nixpkgs/blob/4b7fd0e5614368b7c5aef1e1ba75da4100c69ea4/pkgs/servers/x11/xorg/default.nix#L1987

@vcunat Yes, that's an old comment.