On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 04:21:13PM +0200, Sven Luther scrawled: > On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 11:49:27PM +1000, Daniel Stone wrote: > > That means that we'll be unable to support the version in sid, then. > > No, why, it only is a problem right now because we are one version > behind the XFree86 releases. If we had ready working X 4.3 packages by > the time of its release (and 4.3 was frozen since early november, that > gives us more than 4 month time), then we can start packaging the new > developpment branch, and release it simultaneously or a short time after > the new upstream release, instead of still being fixing 4.2.1. In some > way, you do already that with your 4.3.0 packages, which are not > strictly 4.3.0, but borrow parts of head. If we had a more advanced pool > feature, like it was promissed back then, we could even have a 4.2.1 > pool (on which Branden would work on) and an official 4.3.0 pool on > which you and other would work on. Well, if we were were working on 4.3.0, 4.2.1 wouldn't be as well supported as it is: it takes quite an amount of work to support, and porters would also be split on which one to support - do they debug problems and try to fix with 4.2.1, or do new porting with 4.3.0? > > There's only a limited number of maintainers and porters. > > Yes, that is the real problem. But doing double job with upstream will > not help much here. Well, it's the best we've got in the meantime, I'm afraid. > > The issue here isn't skill or anything like it, just time, pure and > > simple. > > But the attitude of Branden with regard to anything related to 4.3.0 > doesn't help here. If we were to say that we will start now and try to > set up a second XFree86 team which will be packaging the developpment > release of X, still work in common with Branden on some issues, and hand > him the baby once the official release is made, i think you will > possibly attract more people who are interested in just that, and not > frigthen them away. After all, if Branden says not to ask questions > about 4.3.0 until he is ready, who is willing to risk entering his line > of fire about it ? Well, Branden has had bad experiences before, like with 4.2, where he got flamed for not having a new major upstream version of XFree86 ready in time (quite a few people were unable to appreciate how large an effort it was). It comes down to this: he's not getting paid for it, so doesn't want to get harasses about it. I can see that, personally. And I've been doing 4.3 for months, working as closely with Branden as I can (you'll notice that I do regular back-syncs with 4.2.1, and a few of the design decisions I made were stuff Branden was going to do in his 4.3 tree anyway). There's no need to fork the XFree86 team. If you want to make good, quality packages, go ahead and create them. Just let Branden know, try to ensure they don't diverge too much from his packages, or how he plans to do things, and stuff like that. This is what I've been doing for months now. > > Another FAQ entry for me to add to -0ds3v2 (patch merge from hell - 4.3 > > branch, bits of HEAD, plus Michel's Radeon DDC patch), along with the > > other 3 I haven't even written yet. *sigh*. > > So you see, you are no more packaging 4.3, you are already ahead of it. I'm not "ahead" of it per se. There are still more patches to continue merging, more documentation to continue writing, and more architectures to port it to. -- Daniel Stone <dstone@trinity.unimelb.edu.au> Developer, Trinity College, University of Melbourne
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