Re: A strawman proposal for X.org & XFree86.org

On Friday 28 March 2003 10:06, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
|  This mailing list is now a week old, and according the pipermail archives
| has had 807 posts so far, on a wide range of topics and issues regarding
| the future of XFree86, X.org, and X11 itself.   It seems some items have
| reached a relative consensus while others are still under heated debate. 
| While some interesting technical issues have been raised, it would seem
| that the organizational issues still need to be resolved to provide a
| framework for resolving the technical issues in.
|
|  We've been discussing some of these issues (mostly around X.org) for quite
| a while at Sun, and have collected thoughts from this forum, the X.org
| meetings, and our in-the-hallway discussions at Sun into a simple strawman
| proposal to try and bring together the organizational issues into something
| that can form the basis of further discussion.  The following is in no way
| a claim at the best solution or one everyone can agree on, or even one
| everyone involved at Sun agrees with all the points of, but hopefully it
| covers the basic issues that need discussing/clarifying and will give help
| shape further discussion.  Read it, beat on it and see how it stands up and
| where it needs limbs removed or reshaped or new ones attached.  Be warned,
| there are some parts that some may consider radical reform, especially
| involving X.org, and one part involving a rather heinous pun that may cause
| physical pain to the reader.

While many points in this proposal are valid, there are some *untouched* 
questions:

1) wether Sun and other X.org members take *as commitment* duty to develop 
support (or backport existing code from XFree86 CVS) for existing and 
upcoming XFRee86 extensions, like RENDER, Xr, Xc?

Without such commitment from X.org members *in written*, with timetable to 
complete the port specified, further discussions about merging X.org and 
XFree86.org make no sense, IMHO.

2) there is nothing said about trimming X codebase, and in particular - 
eliminating support for PCF and BDF fonts in favour of Freetype backend and 
TTF fonts with embedded bitmaps.
Many open-source developers are concerned with XFree86 codebase size, and they 
expect trimming fat from codebase (and not merging with X11R6.7)

3) my experience of talking to engineers/sales&marketing people in couple of 
"leading UNIX vendors" shows that people from those companies are very proud 
with their "in-house" UNIX implementations, and mostly consider open-source 
software as a joke.
Therefor, I doubt that X.org memebers would accept your proposal .
But let's hear some voices first.

My personal perception of future XFree86 development is adding 
desktop-friendly features to it, required by leading toolkits/desktop 
environments (GTK/GNOME, Qt/KDE)
Compatibility/interoperability with X.org codebase is second priority, IMO.
If X.org wants to be compatible with Xfree86 - they should follow XFree86 
roadmaps. 
On the other hand, we should develop roadmap for XFree86 ASAP,  and make it 
public. 

|
|  	-Alan Coopersmith-      [email protected]
|  	 Sun Microsystems, Inc.   -   Sun Software Group
|  	 Quality, Integration, & Customer Success (QICS)
|  	 Platform Globalization Engin. - X11 Engineering
| 
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|  		Proposal for X.org & XFree86 Direction
|
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-- 
Best Regards,

Vadim Plessky
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