Re: XGL

[David Nusinow <david_nusinow@verizon.net>]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 09:21:53PM +0200, Daniel Immel wrote:
> Hi, do you know the time when xgl might be availible in debian/sid?

I don't know just yet. Xgl turns out to be fairly problematic for several
reasons:

  1) It has yet to actually be released. Every single package that's out
     there for it is based on a CVS pull. This normally wouldn't be a huge
     issue, but Xgl requires CVS HEAD pulls of several other packages to
     work properly, notably glitz and mesa (and possibly still bits of
     Xorg). Debian can't realistically ship CVS snapshots for these
     packages as a stable release, so putting them in to unstable is even
     more difficult.

  2) Even if I could get snapshots of the required components from HEAD in
     to experimental (which requires wrangling a few maintainers or at
     least getting their permission to do it) I still need to actually
     build a working snapshot of Xgl itself. I did manage to get it to
     compile and install in the past, but the server never worked and threw
     an error that I wasn't able to debug. I believe it has something
     obscure to do with the Debian mesa packages, but I haven't worked out
     what that bug is. Someone, most likely me, will have to track down
     this bug (if it still exists) and fix it.

  3) The upload of Xorg 7.0 to unstable has resulted in a lot of bugs that
     I've been steadily working on fixing so that we can actually ship an
     up to date Xorg with etch. As a result, I haven't had a lot of time to
     work on the above problems :-\

So that's what's going on with Xgl right now. It's more than likely we'll
have aiglx enabled in the new xserver once X.org ships 7.1, and the rumor
is that it can be made to run compiz, which is what most people want out of
Xgl anyway.

I'm cc'ing the debian-x list, and if anyone wants to take a serious run at
Xgl (meaning working on packages we could, at the very least, put in
experimental, rather than just another set of unofficial packages like the
zillions of others floating around the net) they're more than welcome to do
so. I'd love to see it actually, because it did turn out to be a bigger job
than I'd anticipated. I'll try to help out anyone who wants to go after
this as best I can, but unfortunately my time is limited right now,
especially with 7.1 fast approaching.

 - David Nusinow