Given my recent election to the post of Debian Project Leader, I expect to
have less time to manage three different X11 trees.
Fabio Massimo Di Nitto has also been unavailable periodically to handle the
xfree86 sarge release, so I feel it is time to grow the team a little bit.
(Note, Fabio, that the job is still yours until and unless you want to give
it up. I'm looking to replace myself as your backup, not replace you. :) )
I think we have ugrent personnel needs in three areas:
xfree86 woody:
Until sarge is actually released, we would be remiss to not offer
security updates and fixes for serious usability issues for the
current stable release. These have already been enumerated[1], and
approved in principle by the Stable Release Manager[2].
xfree86 sarge:
There is still the stuff on the TODO[3] to be accomplished. Some of
this could be deferred to a -14.
xorg-x11:
This is of course the Big Kahuna. Daniel Stone, who maintains
X.Org X11 packages for Canonical Software (makers of Ubuntu) has
been in touch with me via IRC, and since he and I have different
ideas about the best way forward, I think it's best that I not try
to characterize his position. I invited him to post his thoughts
to the list once I wrote this mail.
My current thinking is to continue in the direction we've been
going in the xorg-x11 repository. Ubunutu's packages can be
imported on to a branch, and appropriate bits merged from there.
(Because of things like Drew Parsons taking over xprint, and xprint
not being built by xorg-x11, we can't just drop the Ubunutu X
packages into Debian unstable without basically hijacking xprint
from Drew, which I would oppose.)
One thing Daniel and I did agree upon was that Debian should become
Canonical's source for X packages again. How fast that can/should
happen is another question.
I will say that until testing-proposed-updates and testing-security
are online, I strongly discourage uploading xorg packages of any
kind to unstable. We do not want to wall ourselves off from being
able to make updates to the xfree86 packages that will be in sarge.
In the long run, of course, the monolithic sample implementation tree will
cease to exist.
Josh Triplett has expressed an interest in, and had been doing some
work at freedesktop.org upstream on, packaging the xlibs[4].
I personally am interested in xterm and possibly xdm, but expect to have my
fingers in lots of pies. I see my role as shifting to be more of a mentor.
I'd like to continue to contribute bugfixes to various package trunks, but
I want to stay out of the way of package release management issues -- those
I very much want to delegate, with the except of the relatively small
packages I feel a strong affinity for. The X server does not number among
those.
If ever you wanted to get your hands dirty with the X Strike Force, now
would be a great time to step forward. :)
[1] Message-ID: <20050125174758.GG19425@redwald.deadbeast.net>
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/01/msg03533.html
[2] Message-ID: <20050131184059.GE13656@redwald.deadbeast.net>
http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/2005/01/msg00405.html
[3] http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/svn/xfree86/trunk/debian/TODO
[4] http://cvs.freedesktop.org/xlibs/
--
G. Branden Robinson | There is resilient security in
Debian GNU/Linux | openness, and brittle security in
branden@debian.org | secrecy.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Bruce Schneier
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