6.8.3 release schedule?

[Alan Coopersmith]

Roland Mainz wrote:
> You mean approve&integrate patches ? I'd like to keep the original
> approval queue stuff for the stable branch as I'd like to watch what is
> going in...

Yes, though as I said earlier, I'd like to get a lot more approved
by individuals and reserve the calls for the less clearly obvious cases.

For instance, I just went and looked at the list of the patches 
nominated so far at
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/request.cgi?action=queue&type=approval_X11R6.8.x&group=type

There are 14 approval requests in the queue right now.

I'd approve these 8 straight off myself:

Attachments 1752 & 1896 - sync "nv" driver with Mark Vojkovich's changes
to XFree86 CVS.   [Every time we discuss these, it comes down to "Mark
has access to nVidia register specs, we don't.  Mark knows this driver
and generally does the right thing, so we trust him."  and we just
rubberstamp it.]

Attachment 1909 - another libXpm security fix already applied to head 
and most vendor's releases.

Attachment 2051 - if the pointer is NULL, don't use it.  Simple enough.

Attachment 2079 - see the long email thread just as 6.8.2 was released
about the patch merge error - this simply undoes it.

Attachment 2156 - typo fixes, seems obvious

Attachment 1587 - simple uname portability fix (but then I wrote it 8-)

Attachment 2166 - it's always good to check if an extension is present
before attempting to use it, and this seems an obvious fix to do so.

The other 6, I don't know enough about myself to feel comfortable
approving on my own without looking at the code being changed a bit
more, but I bet there are others on the release-wranglers list who would
stand up for most of them.  (I see nothing wrong with the patches, it's
my knowledge or time to read the code the patches change right now
that is lacking here, not the proposed changes.)

With work on the 6.9/7.0 release starting soon, we need to find a way
to make 6.8.3 move forward without requiring multiple hours a week on
the phone for a whole group of people approving patches, if we want to
be able to have 6.8.3 go forward without holding back the other work.
That's dozens of people hours a week that can go to more productive
tasks - not all will go into X.org work, but if even some does, it's a
win over us all just sitting on the phone trudging through the patches.

There's other simple patches I could nominate, like the Xt man page
patch https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=1718 (bug 2331) -
but if we're going to have to discuss each one on the phone, I'm not
sure the value of fixing in 6.8.3 instead of waiting for 6.9/7.0 is
enough to be worth wasting the time of all the release-wranglers.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering