Minutes from July 30 Release Wranglers call

[Paul Anderson]

Release Wranglers,

The minutes from today's call (without proofreading or spellchecking):


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


The call began at 8:00 Pacific, 11:00 Eastern.


Status on getting features merged into tree
-------------------------------------------
Stuart K thanked Kevin and Eric for their support in helping
Stuart get DAMAGE and XFIXES merged to the main trunk.  The
XEVIE is also in there, but it is not building now because
he hopes that will be committed soon, too.  

Stuart will continue working with Deron Johnson to move his
composite work into the trunk today.  Eric asked for more
specifics on what Deron is doing.  The last Eric saw, Deron's
work didn't wrap RENDER at all, and that must be done.  Eric
had started work in this area and wonders if it really overlaps
(or not) with Deron's work.  Stuart thinks it will be easier
to put Eric and Deron in direct communication so they can talk
this over.

Jim feels that we need to get the key features into the tree
so that the build can stabilize.  

Kevin will update the release page to note that DAMAGE, XFIXES,
XEVIE are in the tree.  

Kevin has just received a new patch from ATI and has done some
testing.  Provided the testing goes smoothly, Kevin will merge
those changes into the tree later today.

Kevin also noted that Keith sent around some e-mail about some
new trapezoid code.  Keith has checked it into the kdrive tree
but not into the main tree.  Kevin and Eric will talk with Keith
further on this.

As far as deadlines for today's feature freeze go, Kevin suggested
midnight in Hawaii today.

Eric discussed the XAA/RENDER acceleration.  He has the code written,
but needs some review.  Kevin will work with Eric later today.
There are some issues with RENDER acceleration on ATI, but Eric
will look at those after the feature freeze.  He'd like to leave
the acceleration on by default for the moment, and if we can't
solve some of the problems, will change the default to off prior
to the release.

Jim asked Egbert about the nVidia rotation patch.  Egbert said
that its adds two function pointer to the screenInfo structure,
and the driver can hook in pointers and later call them for
rotation support.  He didn't like that the driver function that
does the rotation was not contributed to the open source community.
Egbert also thinks that they could collapse the two functions into
one, as that would chew up less space in the structure.  (There is
space allocated in the structure to add new functionality w/o breaking
compatibility, but people would like to only use one slot instead of two.)
Egbert will check what he has into the tree, and Jim will continue
to work with nVidia.

Jim asked who the SiS driver maintainer is - Egbert mentioned that
it's Thomas Winischoffer.  Egbert will ping Thomas to see if he
can take advantage of this in the SiS driver.

Egbert is also working on some PseudoColor emulation code that also
works with acceleration.  Eric suggested that Egbert talk to Keith
about this, since Composite may solve some of the problems.  Kevin
asked is the code was ready for inclusion.  Egbert feels that it's
not very intrusive, but that it's only implemented in one driver now.
He'd like to put it in, but allow it to be disabled by default.
Kevin doesn't have any objections to it going in.

Egbert would also like to do an update for the savage driver, also
with some PseudoColor overlay code that now takes advantage of
some hardware features.  He would like to merge it to CVS head, but
it needs to be explicitly enabled in the configuration file in order
for anyone to see it.


Egbert asked about the e-mail thread on the xorg at freedesktop list
about Chisato's patch that some people would like to back out.
Egbert said that there was a patch was accessing a non-public field
of a structure.  Egbert previously told Chisato to work with the
freetype people to find a better fix, which Chisato did.  Egbert
has made these changes, so the xorg tree now depends on freetype
2.1.8.  To get the builds to stop complaining, people need to
do one of three things:
  (1) Get freetype 2.1.8 installed on the build machines
  (2) Use some builtins (?)
  (3) One could add some ifdefs to the code so that the build of
      the problematic area will only be attempted if it finds the
      right version

Jim feels that we should bump to 2.1.8 and put a big note about
this in the release notes about it.  Although #ifdefs might work
for now, Jim raised concern that the ifdefs will be forgotten
and live forever, complicating long-term maintainability.  Jim
would like to open up a discussion with the freetype folks about
this so that we catch these types of problems sooner rather than
later.


(Paul dropped out at 12:00 Eastern, Leon continued taking notes,
and the following are from Leon's notes.  Apologies for any
misinterpretations.)

There was some discussion of the extension enabling feature.  There
already exists for this in module loader. It only requires only
adding command-line options and perhaps site configurable add in. 
Kevin is working on the command-line options.

Egbert and Jim noted that config files and the associated information
are hard to find, and that they are too complicated.  Jim noted
that sometime we need to cleanup the configuration mess.  For example,
for his tablet, trying to get working to projector, has to find
necessary parameters, restart X multiple times, etc.

There was concern that the extension loading work might miss
the release, but Kevin is finishing it up today.  New extensions
that will be disabled by default can take advantage of the work
Kevin plans to complete today.  There are other issues related
to configuration that need to be solved, but that will not be
ready today and will wait until later cleanup occurs.

All agreed to proceed with the feature freeze today, although there
are a lot of changes that will be going into the tree in the
coming hours.  At Kevin's discretion, the feature freeze may be
delayed 24 hours.


Other
-----
Egbert discussed some issues that were recently raised on some
of the mailing lists.  Jim asked if PAM might help, but noted
that trying to fix some of them in X will be problematic.  Jim
will put together a write-up for the release notes describing
how the problem can be addressed in platform-specific ways.
Egbert will apply his fix, since the patch makes the behavior
more strict.  He'd like to get feedback now, and if there are
problems, he can back it out before the release.


Jim also mentioned some work paid that HP paid debian to 
complete, and the debian website needs to be updated accordingly.
Jim will track this.


There was also some discussion of spam by Jim, and he noted
that George Franz is working on this.


The next call will occur Monday, August 2, at the same time.
Unless you hear otherwise, the numbers will be:

    11:00EST, 8:00PST, 5:00PM CET
    Access numbers:
      1-866-639-4713 (toll free)
      1-574-948-0365 (toll)
    Passcode: 5517683

If other issues arise that should extend the feature-freeze
deadline, please send e-mail to Kevin Martin: kem at freedesktop.org. 

Next week, we will start going through the bugs filed in bugzilla.
Please start looking through them so we can begin discussing them
on Monday.

The call adjourned at 12:30 Eastern.

-paul