XFree86's Future and thoughts and suggestions

David Dawes wrote:
> How many people can commit directly to the mainline Linux kernel?
> From what you're saying, it sounds like these maintainers submit
> patches to one person (Linus) rather than committing them into the
> mainline kernel themselves?  Is that correct?  XFree86 has 14 people
> who can commit into the mainline XFree86 tree, and anyone can submit
> patches to this group, whether they be people who set themselves up
> as maintainers who collect submissions from others, or people who
> want to submit their patches directly.

The Linux kernel has well over 200 people listed in the MAINTAINERS
file.  They don't have direct access, but patches from them generally
go straight in.  Mono has 150 people with CVS commit priviledges [1].
GCC has about 200, even though they make everyone sign papers.  I
don't have numbers for KDE, but their FAQ has the question

  Q: How do I get cvs access to kde?

  Send a mail to sysadmin (at) kde (dot) org justify why you need cvs
  access. Make sure to specify your full name and e-mail address, if
  the From field in your mails doesn't specify them. Send also an
  encrypted password (for instance using useradd dummy ; passwd dummy
  ; grep dummy /etc/passwd /etc/shadow)

  If you are contributing to an application that is not yours, it is a
  good idea to first submitting your coding as patches to the author
  and let him apply them. If the author is not maintaining his
  application, you might become the new maintainer...

  Although there is no restrictions on cvs rights, we expect you not
  to mess up other developers' code without their consent.

  You must also respect the feature freezes of the release schedule
  (published on developer.kde.org

Gnome has

  Getting a CVS account

  Once you start working on projects in the GNOME CVS repository, you
  may eventually need to get write access to the repository. If you
  are working on a particular module or project, you should ask the
  maintainer of that module for cvs access. If you want to start a new
  module, you should send your name, email address, a description of
  your project and why you think it should be in GNOME CVS to
  [email protected].

  Maintainers wanting to add an account to CVS will need to mail this
  request to [email protected]. They will need to include a login
  name, the user's real name and email address, and crypted
  password. You can generate a crypted password with the cryptit.pl
  Perl script or use the online cgi script.

Note that neither is asking for "years of service".  And yet somehow
the projects have not imploded because of crap in the codebase.

Xfree86 has to get a lot less stingy about who they let commit.
XFree86 should have an order of magnitude more commiters.  The reason
it doesn't is not because people aren't willing to help.  It is
because the XFree86 team doesn't trust anyone.

Regards,
Walter Landry
[email protected]

[1] http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3170