Around 14 o'clock on Jun 19, Martin Michlmayr wrote: > I thought X.Org was the monolithic while FreeDesktop.Org the modular > release. Since you mention X.Org and the monolithic release, I guess > this is not correct. Can you explain the difference between X.Org and > FreeDesktop.Org? The current X.Org release (6.7) is monolithic. And, it may be that the next release (6.7.1? 6.8?) will be monolithic as well. There are many people interested in seeing X.Org move to a modular structure, as well as a few dinosaurs interested in preserving their existing world views. Unfortunately, the most vociferous dinosaur, Egbert Eich, is also a very important maintainer. The biggest migration issue is the transition from imake to autotools; imake just can't handle a modular environment and so must either be radically altered or replaced. I don't know of anyone seriously interested in spending the effort needed to make 'imake' do this, and I know of many people (myself included) who would like to rid the world of it forever. If autotools were really dramatically better, this would be a no-brainer, alas they are only differently disabled, making transition from imake something of a learning experience for all involved. The projects I started at freedesktop before X.Org decided to do their own release were (originally) strictly for my own research efforts. Of course I made them work the way I wanted using autotools and a very modular environment. Many other people have joined in to help efforts in this tree. A few have started exploring how to build the XFree86-based modular driver architecture within the X server, including replacing the custom ELF/COFF loader with dlopen. That work is now actually making progress; things seem to be coming together and you can run that server with at least two of the drivers. So, the big question is how to get everyone back into a single tree. Ideally, Egbert would let us just ditch the imake build system and move X.Org to autotools in one big jump; we have almost all of the build infrastructure ready and waiting in my 'research' trees. Alternatively, we would slowly modify the X.Org tree imake build infrastructure so that we could lay a modular autotools build system alongside and build either way. That's the current plan, but no-one has gotten started doing the work; I was going to look into it, but I really have other things I think I should be working on instead. One thing is clear -- the disagreements among the participants are amiable and there is a strong desire to make the build system work for everyone with a minimum of pain, and an absolute resolve to get to a single tree that is DFSG free as well as GPL compatible. -keith
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