[forum] Community government, new developers, release cycle

[Eric Anholt]

The most basic problems I see with the XFree86 project are the lack of
community government, resistance to new developers, and a slow release
cycle.

The slow release cycle is a straightforward problem.  Distributions
(FreeBSD for example) end up shipping the year-old X releases and
lacking support for significant new hardware.  We have the option of
backporting drivers, of course, but then that work would be duplicated
across many distributions, and most of us don't have the time and often
the hardware and experience necessary to do it.  The solution I think
would be optimal is running development in two branches, one being HEAD,
which would be targeted now at XFree86 5.0, and a stable branch, which
would continue releasing 4.x and backporting tested fixes and updates
until it's been acceptably replaced by 5.x.  Yes, this would require
more work by the committers, but that could be alleviated by allowing
more committers.

Community government: I was able to find BOD bylaws through google
cache, but nothing about core.  I know exactly one member of BOD, and 6
out of 15 of core.  None are elected, that I know of.  What decisions
that are made are done in private and little is known of how they came
about.  I think FreeBSD core handles this well: They conduct discussions
in private, but release monthly minutes to the developers of the key
points of discussions and the votes that occurred, minus anything that
was explicitly requested to be private.  The nine members are elected
every two years by the developers (anyone with cvs access, currently
somewhere around 330 I think). If there is going to be a core/BOD team
running XFree86, I think they should be elected by those who have a
stake in developing XFree86 (current committers, driver maintainers, 
contributors, distro maintainers, DRI developers, GATOS developers,
???).

Resistance to new new developers (in terms of access to CVS):  I think
this is the primary problem most people see with the project as it
currently exists.  It has resulted in the forks, including GATOS and
DRI, which make it difficult to track new development of XFree86.  I
don't see this being solved until there is community government of the
project, though.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                eta@lclark.edu          
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/         anholt@FreeBSD.org