Re: request for volunteers: xfree86 woody, xfree86 sarge, and xorg-x11 uploaders
On Wed, Apr 20, 2005 at 03:13:19AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> 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.
To be honest, I don't have the time to work on all of these, and I have
little interest in the xfree codebase anymore. I can possibly step in to
help a little if needed (I'll check the footnotes tonight if I have time)
but I have a few goals of my own pre-sarge that need to get taken care of.
> 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.)
I feel that, at least for the current monolithic tree, we should definitely
be using the Ubuntu packaging as a starter. Once we have installable, if
buggy for our purposes, packages, we can get to work on tuning them for our
needs.
> 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'm glad to hear this.
> 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.
That's fine. I don't think people really need xorg packages in unstable at
this point, but my reading of both developers and users is that they'd like
to see some real visible progress, in the form of packages they can use
from official debian sources, available to them, even if it means using
experimental.
> In the long run, of course, the monolithic sample implementation tree will
> cease to exist.
Hooray! Now that the modularization proposal has been adopted in full, we
need to start planning for it. I think transitioning to the modular tree
ASAP is wise, since I forsee it stabilizing far in advance of etch's
release.
> Josh Triplett has expressed an interest in, and had been doing some
> work at freedesktop.org upstream on, packaging the xlibs[4].
Awesome. Hopefully he and Daniel can work together on this.
> 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.
I'm willing to work on the X server. Indeed, it's where my primary interest
lies, in pushing it forward with things like hotplugging and hardware
autodetection. If I'm going to work on it though, I'd feel far more
comfortable with a comaintainer or two, since I don't have a lot of video
card hardware available (or even space in my home to put it if I did buy
it) and I'm not currently very knowledgeable about the x server internals
(I'll change that soon though). Would anyone be willing to help me out with
this? If not, I'm still willing to take it on, but I worry that quality
will suffer.
> If ever you wanted to get your hands dirty with the X Strike Force, now
> would be a great time to step forward. :)
I think you and Daniel are going to have to work something out in terms of
svn tree access. Realistically, he's done an enormous amount of work as of
late, and it's much to Debian's benefit to have him working directly on the
same tree.
Other than that, I like the idea of splitting the team up a bit, with
different people taking primary responsibility for different modules of the
tree. I don't think I noticed the XSF work this way previously, but it's
nice to see things shaping up that way naturally.
- David Nusinow
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