Corinna Vinschen wrote:
Honestly, I have no idea yet! The problem is, so far we refused to do X support, simply for the fact that we have no experience in our dept with X, so giving support for it was always a bit too daring. Getting more requests for X under Cygwin means right now, we have to refuse certain support contracts, which is not really a good idea in the long run. So we were wondering if you would be interested in helping us *before* we actually sign a support contract including X.
Ah, I see.
The usual Cygwin support is so-called user support. Hazarding a guess what will crop up: - Installation problems and questions about deployment of Cygwin and X. - The typical set of problems from the cygwin-xfree list. - Probably very seldom: Bugfix support for Xserver. As you can imagine, I can't even tell how much work is involved, but as typical support contracts go, there's a time during deployment which brings a couple of requests, then it starts petering out and there will be only the occasional request. Depends also on the number of customers signing for X support, naturally.
OK.
Oh, btw., for obvious reasons we don't give support for Cygwin 1.7 based installations yet. Our support is restricted to Cygwin 1.5.25 based installations. Or better, 1.6.10, since that's the official Red Hat supported release, which is based on 1.5.25 plus a few additional fixes.
So what version of X would support customers be using? Our Cygwin/X 1.5 releases? Honestly, I haven't touched 1.5 since I got my new computer a few months ago, thinking that 1.7 was then coming RSN. :-) (Nor have I missed it frankly; the new features in 1.7 have made porting software SO much easier.) Hence, Cygwin/X for 1.5 didn't see the last batch of updates (libX11-1.2, xserver-1.6, etc.), and X11R7.5 is coming next month with another new set of updates.
At what point will there be a 1.8.0 based on 1.7? Can 1.6 (and will 1.8) be parallel installable with 1.7?
If you're becoming a contractor, you would of course have access to the internal CVS repository as well, and you would have automatically signed the Cygwin copyright assignment form without ever actually signing. So you can also make non-trivial patches to the Cygwin package itself from then on. :)
Yeah, I've been thinking that with the number of small patches I made this year that I really should sign, but I haven't needed anything so big as to actually require it. (I did have a patch for canonicalize_file_name, as a new component of GNOME 2.28 uses it, but Eric beat me to it.)
I have no idea how this works, but we have contractors around the world. Above all, we have Canadian offices in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal, if that's important to the Canadian government. Our legal dept usually knows what's the best solution. In my case, for instance, I'm a German working from my home in Germany entirely for the US based "GES" department, but for legal reasons I'm officially hired by the German branch in Stuttgart.
I'm sure between your lawyers and mine that we can easily figure this out.
Ok, if you're still interested after my babble, I will involve my manager Gary Lamb, so we can discuss this further.
That would be fine. Thanks, Yaakov -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/ FAQ: http://x.cygwin.com/docs/faq/
