Minutes from July 26 Release Wranglers call

[Paul Anderson]

Release Wranglers,

The minutes from today's call:


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



Call began at 8:00 Pacific, 11:00 Eastern.


Update about OLS and desktop conference from Jim Gettys.  
(I wasn't taking minutes at that time.  Leon may have minutes
for that section.)


Updates/status of current work in progress:
-------------------------------------------

Composite:

Stuart K was not on the call, so we don't have an update on any
updates related to Composite, and Alan didn't have any update from
Stuart.  Egbert noted that Deron Johnson wants to get commit access
in order to be able to commit some patches.  Egbert/Kevin will work
to get him the access that he needs.  There is a patch floating around
that Eric/Kevin/Egbert will review.  

Action: Kevin will contact Stuart K and Deron to find out what their
status is and report back to Release Wranglers on their status.


XEVIE:

The XEVIE extension also has some work remaining.  Kevin will 
ping Stuart K for an update on that.  The last Egbert had heard
was that there was some work in progress to resolve some of the
potential security concerns.  Alan had made some suggestions, 
but they need to be written up and the document updated.  Egbert
also noted that the 1.1 code changes need to be added to the
repository, and the security-related changes need to be written
and added to the tree as well.  

Action: Alan will ping Derek Wang about the status.


Jim noted that Keith's "region expand" code is done, but just needs
to be committed to the tree.

Kevin asked if there were any updates for the "background == None"
case with DAMAGE.  No updates.

Egbert - we also need to think about how to make these extensions
configurable at startup time so that they can be disabled by default.
Kevin has thought about this a little, and it's on his "to do" list
for this week.  Kevin thinks it will be fairly straightforward, so
he plans to have something written up this week that can be
circulated to others.  

Composite and XEVIE are the two extensions known at the moment that
would likely be disabled by default in the next release, but this
mechanism would be used to enable them via the configuration file.  
Jim noted that there are two classes of extensions - experimental
and deprecated.  Kevin wants to generalize it further to treat 
all extensions equally, but some extensions will be "default on"
and others will be "default off."  The documentation could then
be updated accordingly for each extension and to explain why some
extensions are "default off" (such as (a) deprecated, or (b) the API
and/or wire protocol may change in an incompatible way in the future,
etc).


Support for new ATI cards:  Kevin has pinged ATI and hasn't heard back
on that.

Egbert also noted that the nVidia open source driver ("nv").  There
is already some support in XFree86 for some newer chipsets that aren't
in the tree.  How should we deal with this?  Can we get permission
from Mark V to take the patches he has committed and apply them to the
Xorg tree?  Egbert will try to contact Mark this week.

Jim also noted that there is a patch from nVidia to make it possible
for drivers to allow XAA drivers to support Rotate on the fly.  That
needs to be reviewed.  Andy is working to get Jim a binary driver that
has that functionality and can be tested on the tablet.  Kevin took
a quick look at the patch and it appeared sane, but he's not familiar
enough with that area to be certain.


MMX code changes - temporary solution is to remove the "pedantic"
flag for that code.  


Kevin noted that the bugs and features that we have are not currently
all in bugzilla.  We need to get them all into bugzilla so that
they can have the appropriate release dependency applied to them.


Egbert is doing some work to make ioctls 32- and 64-bit safe.  Once
he finishes this, he will release it.


Kevin asked people to add other bugs/features to bugzilla if they
aren't already there so that we can have an accurate dependency
tree and know the magnitude of the release.


Success criteria:
-----------------
Kevin sat down with Stuart Anderson at OLS.  They came up with
a general plan to list out each of the combinations of things
we want to support, along with owner name, owner for build
tests, run tests, conformance, etc., for each architecture/distribution
we want to support.  He'll add such a table to the Wiki later this week.
It will not be possible to get complete coverage for this release,
but we'll try to make good tradeoffs to get adequate coverage.  
Egbert and Kevin noted that we can increase coverage in various
areas by running Xvfb and/or the "dummy" driver.  We also need to
get tinderbox working on more platforms.  Eric is working on this.

Kevin also needs help pulling together a more complete list of
OS distributions and architectures.  He's pulled together a
preliminary list, but would like someone to review it.  Some of
the platforms are older and people don't have enough of them
to test them all.  Jim noted that OSDL has some older platforms
that we can possibly use.

Egbert and Kevin asked about various OSes/architectures and looked
for owners to at least perform some amount of build testing:
* HP-UX: Paul Anderson
* AIX: Dan McNichol
* IRIX: Kevin has someone in mind and will also contact Jon Leech
*


Kevin also listed other .cf files.  If you know of other possible
owners for these .cf files or people who would be willing to test
on those platforms, please let them know.  At some time, we may
mark some of them as deprecated, since there is no way for one 
person to test on all of these platforms.  

Jim noted that we need to do better outreach on minority platforms,
since we are missing testing coverage on a lot of them at the moment.  
Kevin asked for assistance to contact people on the "devel" lists
of these other platforms.


Kevin plans to get all of this information about platforms/architectures
onto the Wiki.  He'll send out a generic e-mail announcing the
release, with a pointer to the Wiki.  Leon will follow-up afterwards
with requests to people that may be good candidates to perform
testing on some of these architectures.


Next call:
----------
Plan for next call on Friday at the same time (8:00 Pacific/11:00 Eastern).
Need to keep discussions going on mailing lists between now and then,
however, as there is a lot that needs to get into the tree by
Friday.  If there is a need, may have a short, focused call on
Wednesday morning at 9:00 Pacific/12:00 Eastern to get a status update
from people.


Call adjourned at 9:48 Pacific, 12:48 Eastern.


Best regards,

-paul