[forum] A Call For Open Governance Of X Development

[Eric Anholt]

On Fri, 2003-03-21 at 02:46, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> >     * Slow release schedules
> > 
> >       Since the XFree86 4.2 release in January 2002, support for 27 new
> >       versions of the ATI Radeon chip was added to the XFree86 Radeon
> >       driver. Anyone using one of these chips was either forced to wait
> >       for the February 2003 release of XFree86 4.3 or run an unreleased
> >       version of XFree86.
> 
> Slippage of Open Source projects is always a bug bear. Look at FreeBSD 5.0.
> That was on the cards for quite some time, but always kept slipping. 
> Voluntary work can always cause problems regardless of their situation.

There were specific projects to be done for FreeBSD 5.0, in particular
locking down of enough of the kernel to show that SMPNG would work and
completing a significant portion of KSE.  These were why 5.0 was delayed
-- there was no reason for 5.0 until those things were at least mostly
done.

In the meantime, we've continued releasing 4.x on pretty regular
schedules.  We slipped 4.8 by a week to allow for XFree86 4.3
integration.  If there had been a release of XFree86 six months ago, I
wouldn't have bothered getting the new version in during freeze (and
life would have been _much_ easier).  It was only after quite a bit of
discussion with portmgr and the release engineers that this decision was
made.  Updating mozilla, something people cared about almost as much,
was denied.  The 4 month release schedule of our stable branch is still
quite regular, so I don't see long slippage being inevitable.

When I asked for faster release schedules, I was thinking mostly of a
stable branch.  For XFree86 5.0 where we have a todo list of major
changes, I don't see a need to stick a date on it necessarily (or at
least understand that it's a very fuzzy date).  However, more frequent
releases of a stable branch would be very helpful.  The proposal to have
separate driver releases would satisfy this mostly, but I still feel
that full releases from a stable branch would be the best route.

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