So what next?

[Leon Shiman]

Keith,

this proposal should be discussed on Monday's call. this is an important  
holiday week and weekend for many.

i feel strongly that this is too important an issue to be dealt with when 
some who would participate can't.

leon


on Thu, 08 Apr 2004 10:03:36 -0700 Keith Packard wrote:
>
Around 18 o'clock on Apr 8, Egbert Eich wrote:

> I would like to do the merge of RELEASE-1 before the other merge.
> I've set a base tag to simplify this, and I'm afraid this will not
> work if we merge to head first.

Yes, I was wrong -- this is clearly the right order.  We need to appoint 
someone to do this task; it isn't something which can be shared.  I think 
it should be either you (Egbert) or I as we have more complete knowledge 
about how RELEASE-1 was hacked together.

> I certainly would not mind to have the ongoing development taking 
> place in HEAD. XFree86 moved to this structure years ago and I know
> nothing that would speak against it.

Once XORG-CURRENT is really current, then moving that to HEAD should be 
simple.  I think we have rough concensus that this is the right thing to 
do.

> This gives no value to the user and just delays things.
> We need to get technology out to remain credible.

I believe we will not have concensus on this issue anytime soon and that we
need a formal conflict resolution process here.

I'm feel strongly that now is the best time to make the migration to a
modular build system, and that separating the build system transition from
any technical changes will give people the greatest confidence in the new
system.  Doing that transition at the same time we add a bunch of new code
will be very hard on everyone.

Whether we make a "release" of the system with the new build environment 
is a separate issue. I'd suggest we make a minor 'point' release just so 
everyone can get resynchronized at this point, but if others feel that it 
would just confuse users, I could live with that.

> Changing the build system is some internal reorgainzation issue and that's
> nothing the user cares about.

Yes, that's why I want to get it done now -- the monolithic build is going 
to make all future development harder for me (at least) and harder to get 
distributed (at least for Debian).  The sooner we get it done, the faster 
things can happen in the future.

-keith