Re: Suggestion for XFree86

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 04:52:40PM -0500, Carl Worth wrote:

>The largest barrier seems to me that membership rights and
>responsibilities are not defined, (at least not publicly), nor is
>the process for obtaining membership.

"Membership" is a non-issue.  It was only an issue in the old closed
development days.  The original reason for having members at all
was so that XFree86 developers could be involved in the X Consortium's
X11R6 development process back in 1994, and the X Consortium didn't
allow for individuals to participate.  There is no reason for a
general XFree86 membership, and there hasn't been for a long time.
The recent opening of the devel list and removal of member-only
mailing lists eliminated the last "privilege" of membership.  None
of the general membership never had any formal voting rights anyway.

I'm at a loss as to why people even ask about XFree86 membership
anymore.

>2) There is a web-page (http://www.xfree86.org/developer.html), that
>   says,
>
>	How to Become an XFree86 Developer
>
>	Get and build the latest XFree86 code from the CVS repository,
>	and subscribe to the XFree86 developer list (see above).
>
>   In my experience, I've done these since about August 2001, but
>   clearly that's not enough to get on the project.

What else do you think you need to do to write code for XFree86?
Writing code for XFree86 is the definition of an "XFree86 developer".

Actually a large fraction of what were "members" didn't qualify as
developers by that definition, and were there mostly to get access
to the code before the CVS repository was publicy available, and
to follow discussions before the devel list was made public.

I'm trying to understand what you feel you're missing by not being
classified as an "XFree86 member".

>   OK, I've got about 1000 lines of code in the server, (since about
>   June 2002) implementing the trapezoid geometric primitive for the
>   RENDER extension.
>
>   I only got that code committed because I was lucky enough to have
>   volunteered to write some code needed by a member of the core team,
>   (Keith Packard) who committed it for me. Obviously, I can't use
>   that route to maintain my code anymore.

How do you think people who don't have your connections got their code
committed?

>   So what can I do to continue to maintain the code I wrote? Send
>   patches and pray? I've seen enough examples of this process failing
>   that I'm not even willing to try it (see above about how current
>   developers are all too busy). It's an inherently unscalable process
>   if the group of developers cannot grow.

Do you have any statistics for how often that process fails vs how
often it succeeds.  That would be very useful data for this
discussion.  Keith managed to use that mechanism successfully
between when he lost his commit access and the 4.3.0 release.

David
-- 
David Dawes
Release Engineer/Architect                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes