Minutes from July 16 Release Wranglers call

[Paul Anderson]

Release wranglers,

The minutes from today's call:

Attendees
---------
Paul Anderson
Egbert Eich
Alan Coopersmith
Kevin Martin
Dan McNichol
Stuart Anderson
Eric Anholt
Jim Gettys
Leon Shiman
Stuart Kreitman


Just prior to the call, Kevin sent out an e-mail summarizing
proposed plans for the next release.  For the most part, it
was a summary of some of the discussions that occurred on
the xorg at freedesktop.org mailing list over the past week.

The information in the "New features" section was gathered
from the CHANGELOG (they are new features currently in the tree
that were added since X11R6.7).  He will also try to gather a more
complete list of other bugs that have been fixed.

The list of new features planned for inclusion into the HEAD of the tree
include: 
 * XFixes (including the new RegionExpand code)
 * Damage extension - seems to be ready - need to resolve the
   "background == None" issue that Keith has discussed in e-mail
 * Composite
   - some mixed opinion on whether or not this is really ready for release
   - Jim: We need to get it out as soon as we can so that people can start 
     experimenting with it.  We could put it into the tree, but have it
     off by default.  It needs some serious mileage before it's considered
     "finished".
   - Eric: So we'd release it as an "optional" extension knowing that we
     might make some protocol changes to it later on?  
   - Jim: Yes.
   - All seemed to feel that shipping it, but with the extension of by
     default, would be the best way to get it out there.
   - Paul asked if Alan knew how the wrappers were going, but he hasn't
     heard a status update lately.
   - Egbert mentioned that he may start looking into doing some XAA wrappers
   - Kevin and Egbert are going to take a closer look at the code and see
     how invasive the code is.  This is something we need to nail down.
 * XEVIE
   - Stuart K have been working on this; Egbert has taken a look at it.
   - Paul asked about the security implications that were discussed at
     the last developer's meeting and if those have been discussed further.
   - Stuart K joined:  There is an update to allow multiple clients to
     use XEVIE.  Alan has made a recommendation to further improve security
     for this, but that has not been implemented yet.
   - Egbert: Clients that aren't XEVIE-aware would not be aware that they
     could be snooped.  Does the change give you a way to request a list
     of clients that could be actively using XEVIE?
   - Alan: The proposal is to be able to request a list of clients that
     are looking at input and then register to receive events as new clients
     use XEVIE.  That has not been implemented yet, however.
   - There are further technical issues with this extension that need to be
     sorted out in a separate forum.
   - If we ship this extension without some of the security issues solved,
     then we must ship it off by default with wording in the documentation
     that enabling it could open up some holes.
   - Stuart K: GNOME builds require certain extension libraries to be
     present for some things to compile, even if those features are off by
     default.  All felt that was OK.
 * New ATI cards
   - Support for several new ATI cards, and RENDER support for a number of
     cards.
 * MMX Render acceleration
   - Soren has finished this work and has sent an e-mail to the xorg mailing
     list.  It's pretty much ready.  The only open issue is that to compile
     this, he had to remove the -pedantic flag from DefaultCCOptions.
     He hasn't found an easy way to do this, but is seeking suggestions.
     The "-pedantic" flag helps with portability, so some might not want it
     off.
   - Egbert: You can look at the DRI code to figure out how to deal with
     that, because the DRI code has some MMX stuff.
   - Eric:  That was implemented in assembly code.
   - Kevin:  If you have ideas, please reply to Soren on the xorg at freedesktop
     list.  They do give a pretty good boost for RENDER across some commonly
     used code paths.  One of the other advantages is that he's added a 
     framework so that other optimizations will be easier to add in the
     future.
   - Eric: Have these RENDER changes been tested with "rendercheck" to make
     sure the math hasn't been broken?  Kevin will check.
   - Most people feel this is a good thing to put it, as it will give a
     boost and is fairly self-contained.
 * The next three items (#7, #8, #9 in Kevin's e-mail) would be good to
   add sometime, but it is unlikely they will make this release, since
   Keith will not have time to complete them for this release.  The three
   items are:
   * TrueType wrappers for bitmap fonts
   * New trapezoid specification for Render
   * New trapezoid implementation for Render
   If others would like to help with these, their help will be appreciated,
   but it is still unlikely they could be completed in time for the
   currently-planned release.

Jim asked if anyone knows what the current state of the new security work
that Eamon Walsh is working on.  Nobody has heard anything, but someone
will ping Eamon.  Kevin will also add this to the list of features he's
tracking.

That's the current list of new features.  If other people have other
suggestions, they should be discussed on the xorg at freedesktop list.


Schedule:
Kevin has put together a rough schedule using 25 Aug 2004 as the 
release date.  That puts the feature freeze at 30 July and the code
freeze at 13 Aug.  This is just a proposal at this time.  Nobody on
the call raised any objections to this plan.


The next thing to do is to keep moving forward.  The schedule is
quite aggressive, particularly in light of OLS next week and 
summer vacations.  Kevin will add all of this to the Wiki later today.
He will also come up with a "To Do" list and include that in the
Wiki.  As a release group, we also need to come up with a list of
success criteria.


Other issues:
Egbert asked what we should do about the 400+ commits that have gone
into other trees since our last release.  This would be a fairly
time consuming effort just to sort through them all, let alone pull
selected changes into the tree.

Jim - we need to be much more explicit about our criteria for code
inclusion.



Next call:
----------
Next Friday's Release Wranglers call will be cancelled, since so many
people will be at OLS all week next week.  We'll probably need to
increase our meeting frequency now that a release is in motion.
We'll plan to meet next on Monday, 26 July 2004, after everyone has
returned from OLS.



Best regards,

-paul