Re: Community government, new developers, release cycle

On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 06:06:52PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 01:41:28PM -0800, Eric Anholt wrote: 
>> The slow release cycle is a straightforward problem.  Distributions
>> (FreeBSD for example) end up shipping the year-old X releases and
>> lacking support for significant new hardware.  We have the option of
>> backporting drivers, of course, but then that work would be duplicated
>> across many distributions, and most of us don't have the time and often
>> the hardware and experience necessary to do it.  The solution I think
>> would be optimal is running development in two branches, one being HEAD,
>> which would be targeted now at XFree86 5.0, and a stable branch, which
>> would continue releasing 4.x and backporting tested fixes and updates
>> until it's been acceptably replaced by 5.x.  Yes, this would require
>> more work by the committers, but that could be alleviated by allowing
>> more committers.
>
>XFree doesn't seem that bad in this area - looks like:
>
> 4.1: June 2001
> 4.2: January 2002
> 4.3: March 2003
>
>So, 7 months, then 14 months. 14 isn't great, but 7 was good.

That one's easy.  Between 4.1 and 4.2 I was in a job that allowed
me to spend most of my time on XFree86.  That's when we decided to
setup a regular 6-month schedule.  But we spoke too soon, and since
then, like many others, I don't have the luxury of working full
time on XFree86 anymore.

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