Re: Call Monday 24 Jan 2005

On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 12:16:56AM +0100, Roland Mainz wrote:
> Adam Jackson wrote:
> > I don't see why we should wait until February to discuss something that's an
> > issue now.
> 
> It's faster to do the overall planning on the conference. It's much
> quicker than doing it on a mailinglist (and it will likely be less
> stressing, too :)

But, again, not everyone can be there.  I suggest not deliberately being
exclusionary unless you want to fund everyone on this list who wants to go and
participate.

> > So if you're the maintainer for xrx, go turn it back on; and then justify
> > including it in a monolith when it's a browser plugin, without resorting to
> > arguments of the form "but it was in pre-6.7 releases".
> 
> Parts of the xrx technology (like lbx, appgroup, security, Xaw8 etc.)
> live in other parts of the monolithic tree. And as Keith Packard said:
> There is no other place to put it, the Xorg monolithic tree is the
> primary source of this code (excluding the CERN labs version of the
> plugin (which is now more or less obsolete as the Xorg foundation now
> ships with a working plugin enabled again)). And just splitting off the
> source costs time which I don't have right now. Rememeber I only took
> maintainership of the xrx stuff as there were several requests to get it
> fixed and noone else cared so I did the job after syncing with Egbert.

'I don't have time to do it properly' isn't an excuse for doing it poorly.  Your
argument here is circular:
	* we include it because we're the canonical upstream source,
	* we're the canonical upstream source because we include it.

There's no actual reason in this for including a *browser* plugin that could be
somewhere else.

> > You'll have a much harder time convincing me of the continuing value of old
> > rotting source packages (extras/).  And please don't make the "but the distro
> > might have an old version" argument; that's the distro's bug, not ours.  The
> > "but the user might not have freetype" argument is also invalid; they should
> > go to the freetype website and download the thing then.
> 
> The last argument is VERY valid as it means that there are
> prerequirements to build the Xorg tree which can only be fixed by being
> an admin of the matching machine (you'll find not many environments
> where people grant you root rights without any further explanations).
> Installing extra source packages isn't always trivial in some
> environemnts and that's one of the reasons why the current way of having
> a self-contained build and development environment is still a good
> thing.

Err, maybe I'm totally missing something, but if you're going to be installing
the monolithic tree, surely you have some form of administrative privileges,
anyway?!  It doesn't make a difference where you install FreeType from if you're
going to be slamming 18 million lines of source in anyway.

> > Likewise xterm.  We don't need xterm for anything - nothing else in the build
> > depends on it - and we don't apply any patches to it.
> 
> That is not 100% correct, the Xorg trunk version is AFAIK in sync with
> Thomas Dickeys version.

... eventually.  There's a while of desync.

> > It's the perfect
> > example of a modularised application.  We have no reason to include or build
> > it besides that we always have done so in the past.
> 
> What about those platforms which build&ship Xorg as one chunk (as AIX,
> HP-UX do) ?

What about them?  You haven't provided any arguments here, apart from 'change is
bad'.

> And what about the old behaiour to build everything for
> developers that they can do testing ?

Again, what about it?  And how is this actually beneficial?  If I change
something in the server, it's much, much quicker for me with the modular tree.
I can do a complete clean and rebuild of the debrix core in 20 minutes on my
laptop, whereas the monolithic tree takes a handy two hours.  Besides, building
individual components allows you to see the impact of your changes: how well it
plays with anything else.  If anything, it encourages better development.  But
if you want to rebuild the entire tree, you can do that too.

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