Re: Discussing issues

On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 05:13:37PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 09:46:03PM +0100, Alan Hourihane wrote: 
>> And the separate CVS tree for development of certain features is still
>> a viable option for this work and become a friendly fork such as the
>> DRI. 
>> 
>
>I agree a separate CVS tree could be viable, at least when there are
>well-defined modules.
>
>> Keith already has his own CVS and can manage that as he sees fit and
>> submit work back for inclusion in the mainline tree. That way Keith
>> and the various people interested in them extensions get to focus on those
>> type of features.
>
>The issue though is that simply separating CVS doesn't address the
>issue of how decisions are made; Keith submits his work back for
>inclusion, or other people do, but who then makes the call on whether
>to include it. What is the process for deciding these matters.  Who
>determines the release schedule? Who decides what code is in a
>release?
>
>I'm not saying the wrong person will, or the wrong call will be made,
>or anything like that. I'm not even sure what you would propose for an
>answer to that question so I'm not criticizing your answer.
>
>It just seems to me that where the code lives is not what people are
>(primarily) arguing about.
>
>> It should work exactly as Alan Cox mentioned regarding the 'sparc port'
>> for linux. Why can't it work in this case too ?. I don't see any reason
>> why it couldn't.
>
>I think it could, provided people are comfortable with how decisions
>are made on the stuff they submit.
>
>When it comes right down to it, there are decisions to make that must
>be shared decisions. Schedules, module organization, general project
>goals. "Agree to disagree" works up to a point (and is in fact *good*
>when it works, because it's more modular/scalable), but it breaks when
>you need to make a shared decision.

I don't understand why this is even an issue.  Right now, Jane Doe
can collect all of the pieces she's interested in and create an
XJane release whenever she wants.  Whoever needs a "release" can
create one that suits their needs, and on a schedule that suits
them.  Don't the Linux vendors effectively do this already?  Isn't
that an important part of the value they add to the free stuff they
sell?

David
-- 
David Dawes
Founder/committer/developer                     The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes