On Tue, Sep 18, 2001 at 01:12:34PM +0100, Will Newton wrote:
> What are the odds of the project coming under the XFree86 umbrella? AFAIK the
> only reason that DRI was outside of XFRee86 was because it began at PI, and
> then when it moved to VA Linux they hosted it on Sourceforge (?).
>
> XFree86 has a lot of infrastructure in place, would allow better
> synchronization of releases and has a lot more impact as a "brand". e.g. they
> have a lot of working code and developers, they have a track record. That
> could be enough to convince card manufacturers that the people they are
> dealing with mean business.
Moving it back under XFree makes a lot of sense. Merging back and forth
with XFree is a pain. We've been trying to do that for quite a
while. There were a few reasons it has remained separate.
First, was that XFree was considered too closed. There have been
complaints that our initial design and development was done in a closed
manner and we were trying to address that by making them more
open. Since then XFree has opened up access to their CVS tree and there
is an open discussion group (xpert) that gets used widely. XFree still
has the same membership requirements and does have it's own closed
lists for various purposes, but you could make a lot more of it be open
now.
Second, we knew we were going to be going through some very rapid
development. We didn't want to wait on XFree's release schedule. We
could make new versions available and get them tested prior to XFree
releases. This is less true now that the framework is up and there are
several stable drivers. Changes a more self contained and don't impact
the rest of XFree nearly as much.
Third, XFree only gives CVS write access to a small group of
people known as the core group. Everyone else has to submit patches and
a core member applies them to the tree. We thorught we could deal with
this limitation, particularly because several of my team were also core
members so we had good control over managing patches if we needed to.
Finally, the big thing that stopped us from moving to XFree at this
point is that XFree doesn't work on branches. They do all their work on
the trunk and only use branches as a means of supporting old
revisions. We use branches to keep dangerous changes out of the release
until they're ready. Again, the DRI is having less major changes, but we
felt this wasn't a good way to handle development. It would have been
very difficult to manage the Mesa-3.5 release under this framework.
The bottom line is that I'm not arguing against moving to XFree, in
fact, I think it is a good idea, but people should realize what issues
are involved.
- |Daryll
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