Re: Suggestion for XFree86

On Mar 20, David Dawes wrote:
 > On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 04:52:40PM -0500, Carl Worth wrote:
 > "Membership" is a non-issue.  It was only an issue in the old closed
 > development days.

That would be fine with me. I was only talking about "membership" since the
xfree86.org web pages do. Note that the page:

	http://xfree86.org/coreteam.html

lists dates for joining the team as well as joining core for each
member, (which suggest that there is some granting of "membership" as
a prerequisite for getting on the core team). If that's gone now,
that's fine.

Remember that a large part of my problem, (and I imagine that of
several others), is that I just can't understand what the XFree86
organization *is*. What are the rules? What are the processes? How are
decisions made?

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

Personally, I don't care about "membership" at all. Only something
such as CVS write access would be important.

 > 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".

Well, writing code, *and* getting it accepted. That seems to be where
some of the problems are.

 > >   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.

I don't have any data. I can provide personal anecdotal evidence that
with the history of problems evidenced in the mailing lists I don't
have much confidence that if I sent large bodies of new code to
[email protected] that it would be incorporated into XFree86.org CVS
in a timely manner. I could very well be wrong, but my impression has
been strong enough that I haven't even tried. So, in as far as me
contributing new code to [email protected], the process has
failed. Perhaps, with me and my code that's no big loss, but that's a
separate issue. ;-)

Note that I'm talking about contributing chunks of new code, not bug
fixes. I think something like [email protected] could work fine for
bug fixes, (and bugzilla can only help).

I think the problem in the current situation is the imbalance between
the core team with easy access to modify the tree and the second-class
citizenship developers who have to send email patches and wait for the
core team to act on them. And then, in order to become a core team
member one has to willingly accept second-class citizenship for "5
years"? No thanks.

Fortunately, in my case, most of the new code that I care about and
continue to develop all exists as client-side libraries. These can all
be developed and released quite independently from all of XFree86. So
I can just setup my own CVS server and ignore xfree86.org without a
problem. It would be more convenient to just do this within XFree86
infrastructure, (after all I'm writing new libraries that live in their
own directories and don't affect any existing code), but the
difficulties in getting that access aren't worth it to me. The things
I lose this way are xfree86 infrastructure, (CVS, bugzilla), and the
distribution channel and name recognition that XFree86 would provide.

It seems the same model would work just fine for driver development
and distribution, (Again with some developer time lost to setting up
infrastructure for CVS, bug-tracking, advertising, etc. -- not
perfect, but quite workable).

This hints at one of the big changes that XFree86 should make. The
project should recognize that the large, complex code base of XFree86
is actually quite modular, (and can become more so), and the developer
community could be more efficient if its organization matched that
modularity.

For example, in my mind there should be almost no barrier of entry for
someone who wants to contribute a new driver. As Linus said once, "If
a new ... driver is broken, it can't be any worse than not having a
driver at all, and even a broken driver is more likely to receive
attention than somebody having to start from scratch."

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                      [email protected]