David Dawes writes: > On Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 11:01:01PM +0100, Fernando Herrera wrote: > >Sun, Jan 12, 2003 at 04:15:15PM -0500, David Dawes escribi�: > > > >>So it's OK for Linux kernel developers to object to having a bug tracking > >>system imposed on them but not OK for XFree86 developers? If that's > >>what you're telling me, then I have nothing more to say on this topic. > > > > No, Maybe I have explained myself wrongly. Linux kernel is > > No I think you explained yourself very clearly, and I find your > attitude personally insulting. You're telling me that it's OK for > the great gnome hoard to impose it's desires on me because I'm not > Linus. > > >developed in a very personal way, the Linus way. It's his project, and > > So it's OK for Linus to develop a project he founded in his own > personal way, but not OK for me to do the same with a project I > co-founded and have spent a large part of my adult life on? > > What nobody has explained to me yet is why gnome in particular has > such a great interest in this. I'd appreciate an open and candid > explanation. >
I would say the XFree86 project is much more like the Linux kernel than like the gnome project. There are very few parts in XFree86 which you want to identify as separate 'products', the only things that come to my mind are the drivers, applications - like xterm - and the libraries. Many of these parts don't even have their maintainer (look at how many drivers are orphaned at the moment). If we look at the servers itself: it is well comparable to the linux kernel. A single person (or a small experienced group) has to make sure that all parts work together well and that modifications to one part don't affect the functionality of the others. That's why commit access is limited to a few people. Even with these few merging conflicts cannot always avoided. I'd be willing to try to work with a bug tracking system. But - like David - I will immediately stop using it when I discover that it consumes my time instead of saving it. If we were going to have a bug tracking system we'd need somebody to preprocess the entries and collect all necessary information from the reporters before the bugs are escalated to the engineers. There is no use having reports like 'KDE application k... has rendering errors when doing this-and-that'. We'd need something like: 'XRequest X... causes rendering errors under these circumstances' Note that this person needs to have a lot of experience. I do understand that desktop projects have great interest in an interface into XFree86. However one needs to keep in mind that the crowd of active XFree86 developers is small compared to the people working on GNOME or KDE. The reason was given in this discussion already: the learning is quite steep. Part of this is due to the fact that there so few separate 'products'. That documentation for the internal APIs (except for the driver API) is largely non existant only adds to that. Egbert. _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
