[forum] XFree86's Future and thoughts and suggestions

[Shawn]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Stuart Anderson wrote:

>This isn't the attitude at all.

>Often, when something is suggested the reply will be a request for someone to
>do the development work and submit a patch. This doesn't really come from a
>lack of interest, but rather a lack of time available to the Core team
>members to do the work. At the moment, I don't think any one with commit 
>privileges is being given any support by their employer to work on XFree86, 
>so things get done using personal time, which is limited.

I understand this, It's not a personal attack on anyone It's just because 
there's less XFree86 developers out there (right now).

>Also, please note that the set of people with commit access is greater than
>the just the Core team.

Fair enough but, There are many projects out that are on a free time basis. 
There seems to be more negativity towards X because of the lack of giving 
more developers access to XFree86's tree. If this happens the negativity will 
vanish.

>This has been suggested, and discussion is ongoing. Making it easier to 
>obtain CVS access, however, is probably much more useful than eliminating 
>the Core team, since they are two separate things.

>Yes, this type of thing is also being considered.

Well, more organization is need on that front AFAIK.

With response to #3:

>We thought we had this.

The only thing I saw from this was Keith's work with KDE/GNOME people on 
bringing new extensions to X, *nobody* else. 

>DRM is handled by the DRI development team, not XFree86.

True but DRM and XFree86 are dependant on each other (for direct 3D hardware 
rendering). Why even bother putting in DRM support if the DRM/DRI/XFree86 
people aren't going to make sure it doesn't break things on their end? I know 
Linus threatened to rip out DRM from the kernel because of any lack of 
direction and synchronization.

>There is a goal to further reduce the differences between GATOS and XFree86,
>but progress has been slow given the resources available to work on it.

Well, this could be sped up if the CVS tree is opened up. I for one use 
GATOS-HEAD and XFree86-HEAD and would test out things (as I don't know X 
programming or the API).

>Politics has nothing to do with any of this. I don't know where people come
>up with the idea that the Core or BOD is scheming again the community. They
>aren't.

>It's very simple. Things get accomplished when people put forth the effort
>and resources to get things done. Not a lot of people have been doing this.

They *cant* because nobody is willing to listen to what the community as a 
whole wants. That's the problem, If you can't open up the CVS tree how do you 
expect people to want to contribute to XFree86? 

If you follow the Kernel development structure, having small forks of the 
kernel help because those changes get merged back into the mainline tree. 
They do not affect development of mainline.

>There does seem to be a fairly steep learning curve to XFree86, but enough
>people have been able to get past that for me to believe that it is not
>impossible to overcome, it just requires the desire and effort to do so.

This is true.

>Suggestions for lessening this learning curve are welcome, but more important
>is the effort required to implement these suggestions.

I don't about this, I haven't looked at the X API Manpages/PS/PDFs.

Shawn.