On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Vladimir Dergachev wrote: >> I'm very happy to hear this! I hope we can get more of a developer >> community going, like I've been feeling in #xfree86 recently. However, >> I still think the specs are valuable (I've used a couple of them, and >> expect to again) even if the current set is limited. Are there any > >I quite agree. The fact is that without hardware specs there is >truly little reason why someone would be interested to working >with XFree86 code instead of writing a userland app. Granted, >XFree86 offers network transparency, but why bother working >within Xserver for a prototype app ? And people who do not get a >chance to work on a toy project within X tree are much less >likely to contribute.
Where hardware is concerned, such as the video drivers, I would agree. More often than not, having the hardware documentation is required, or is at least quite helpful. However, the entire XFree86 sources contain libraries, extensions, applications, fonts, documentation, and many other things - all of which other potential developers could volunteer to work on too, without requiring hardware documentation. >> One thing that I think would help a lot here would be more feedback on >> what was lacking in our patches. I know I submitted some broken ones to >> you, but when you later fixed them I didn't get a note saying "Hey, we >> support FreeBSD back to release X.X, please respect older versions." >> Anything to tell me more of what is expected for the project will help >> me submit better patches in the future. > >There is also an issue of Bazaar versus Cathedral type of development. >There is a tradeoff between quality of patches and number of people >actively working with the code. I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Could you clarify a bit? The Linux kernel for example has a very large source code base, and has countless developers whom have worked on it under the Bazaar model, and the code is quite high quality. People write good patches, and people write bad patches regardless of what model of development is used. However, I think that due to the bazaar style of development the kernel is done under, the bad patches get weeded out much more easily, whereas with the cathedral style of development, they're more likely to simply get ignored or cast aside. Is that similar to what you mean? TIA -- Mike A. Harris _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
