[forum] XFree86's Future and thoughts and suggestions

[James Boyden]

On Tuesday, 01 Apr 2003, David Dawes wrote:

> >   I think most parts of the tree correspond to people who are obvious
> >experts.  Many of these people are the recognized maintainers, though
> >some of them don't have CVS access.  That, in my opinion, should
> >be remedied.  
> 
> I think that there are lots of parts of the tree for which there
> are no people that have the three necessary things to be maintainers:
> 
>    1. they are very knowledgable in the area
>    2. they can make the time/resources commitment to be effective
>    3. they are committed to the general goals and integrity of XFree86
> 
> Some of these areas are probably stable enough that they don't need
> dedicated maintainers.  Others do.  You mentioned input devices
> before.  That's an area that could use an expert with a lot of
> spare time.  If there's someone with experience in the broad input
> handling area, and the necessary spare time who'd like to take this
> on, then they should step forward.
> 
> As it stands now, we have maintainers for some areas that have all
> but the second requirement.  The result is that there are those
> who are dissatisfied with how quickly submissions for those areas
> are handled.  That's why that requirement is essential to really
> deal with the problem of getting stuff reviewed and integrated
> quickly and correctly.
> 
> Anyway, I'd like to see a breakdown of the source tree, with
> prospective maintainer's names attached, and preferably buy-in from
> those nominated.  I've contacted a range of people recently, and
> in the past.

How is this progressing?  Does it look like it will happen?
Is there any chance of such a breakdown being made public, to enable it
to be used in the manner which I suggested in an earlier post?

> Some have accepted the responsibility, some have declined either because
> of lack of time, or because they don't want to be the target of
> "community" negativity if they don't live up to the vocal minority's
> expectations.

Perhaps the people who lack either the time or desire to suffer the slings
and arrows of the outraged vocal minority could be marked as "passive" or
something similar, to denote that they are a source of information only,
and will not accept or review patches, and make no promises that they will
perform active development (at least not the development that is requested
of them by a random outside user).

This way, a new developer can still get information from them (so their
knowledge is not wasted) but if there is someone who wishes to perform
"active" development or maintenance of the particular piece of code, the
standard "you want it? you make it happen." applies.  If that developer
ends up displaying competence in what they do, they can become the new,
"active" expert or maintainer.

There could be a mixture of "active" and "passive" developers for any
section of code.

To continue the idea of an "apprentice" I expressed in an earlier post,
perhaps there could be a few "active" apprentices, and a few, more
experienced developers who wish to be "passive" to the outside world, but
are willing to provide more assistance to their apprentices (who have
demonstrated that they "care" enough about the project to let their code
speak for them).  This would also provide the experienced developers with
more time to focus on issues like high-level design.

Of course, this is all an idealised notion in my head, but there's no
point in not working towards it.  ;)

> Yet others have said that they
> would accept only on the condition that they have free reign
> thoughout the source tree.

To a certain extent, I think the issue of who is "an XFree86 expert or
maintainer" to the outside world should be seperate from who gets what
source tree permissions.  Which is not to say that it is not an issue
that needs to be resolved, but it is something which should be resolved
internally.


                                                  Jimmy.