Re: Invitation for public discussion about the future of X

> This is an invitation for anyone and everyone with an interest in X,
> XFree86, and related technologies and their future to participate in a
> public and open discussion.  Any topics are open to discussion, from
> those related to administrative and management issues through to technical
> issues.

Hi XFree86 forum,

My interrest in XFree86 is mainly as a user rather than as a developer. But
since you are inviting everyone with an interrest to comment I thought I'd
use the oppotunity.

I've been a user of XFree86 for a long time (on Linux), and I've generally
been quite happy with its performance and flexibility. Especially the
ability to run remote clients over the network has been very benneficial to
me. XFree86 is in my oppinion a well functioning piece of crucial
infrastructure.

That's not to say that some things could not be improved. 

Once in a while I've had minor problems and found small (mostly
insignificant) problems in the source. I've then created patches for my own
use - I've never submitted any of those patches to the XFree86 team, since
whenever I've tried to find out who to contact or what lists to send the
stuff to I've had a feeling that it was a very closed community that did not
really welcome outsiders.
Most likely the contributions I could have made over te years would have
been very minor, but I think there are a lot of people like me who find the
odd problem and would like to contribute. If enough people contribute small
things then the combined effect would add up. At the very least it would
have been nice to be able to find somewhere to submit a bugreport.

I think the XFree86 project could bennefit a lot by encouraging a community
of vollumteers like those that surround projects such as KDE, GNOME, the
Linux kernel and many others. 
The KDE project (just to pick an example) has several public mailing lists
where both core developers, users and contributers of small fixes
communicate. They also have a public bugs database (bugs.kde.org) where
everyone can submit bug-reports, wishlist items etc. and can vote on bugs
and continuously follow the progress of work on a specific issue. The result
is that KDE is moving forward at an impressing speed, and I think the
XFree86 project could bennefit enormously from trying to build a similar
community.
For such a community to function properly it needs to be possible for new
developers to relatively easily be able to get write access to the codebase
or the core developers with write access needs to be very active at testing
& integrating patches. Ofcourse not everyone should be granted write access,
but is someone has contributed some times and the stuff looks good, why not
open up and let that person get write access to commit his/her stuff
directly... it seems to work for other projects, it could work for XFree86
as well :-)


> A new mailing list has been created to provide an open forum for this
> discussion.  To subscribe, go to
> <http://www.xfree86.org/mailman/listinfo/forum/>.  The list is
unmoderated,
> and you don't need to subscribe to the list in order to post to it. 

This is a very good initiative.


> It has been brought to the attention of the XFree86 Core Team that one
> of its members, Keith Packard, has been actively (but privately) seeking
> out support for a fork of XFree86 that would be led by himself.  He is
> also in the process of forming a by-invitation-only group of vested
> interests to discuss privately concerns he has about XFree86 and the
> future of X.  He has consistently refused to even disclose these concerns
> within the context of the XFree86 Core Team,

A fork can be good if the two versions keep in touch and exchange fixes and
improvements (the best outcome would be an eventual merge of the two again
in the future). But a if the fork is kept within a closed group and
improvements are not exchanged between the two projects it is probably not a
good thing.


Just my thoughts :)


/Jesper Juhl



PS. The above represents my personal oppinion and not in any way the
oppinion and/or views of my employer.