Re: Get the drivers out the core

On Tue, 15 Apr 2003, Charles Goodwin wrote:

> Being an active developer != being on the BOD, but there
> seems to be no reasonable avenue for bringing in active
> developers to help with project maintainence.  I know people
> will be sick of comparisons, but it seems that XFree86 really
> misses something similar to the Linux kernel development
> environment where a large web of people catch the patches
> and filter them through so that only the good ones reach
> Linus at the top of the tree.
>
> "There's only a few of us doing this in our spare time"
> doesn't wash when it appears nothing is done to encourage
> people to join the active development team.


I think there may be a mechanism for doing this now, but it isn't fully
developed yet. For people that want to contribute, there are plenty of bugs
in the bugzilla that need some work before they are ready to be applied
to the repository.

In many cases, the bug report just says something is broken. Someone need to
investigate these, and propose a solution, and a patch. This is a good
opportunity to get your hands dirty while digging around in the code. I know
a lot of people like having problems to work on as part of their own personal
learning process.

For the bugs that have patches, these need to be reviewed and tested. Often
times, a patch needs to be tweaked a little bit to work on someone elses
hardware or OS. Like above, it's a chance to get your hands dirty, but instead
of trying to answer "what is the problem", you are trying to answer "Is this
the best/most correct solution?".

The end result, will be that the committers will spend less time per bug, and
be able to process fixes faster. It also provides a way to demonstrate your
skills and abilities so that at some point in the future you can earn commit
access for yourself.


                                Stuart

Stuart R. Anderson                               [email protected]
Network & Software Engineering                   http://www.netsweng.com/
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