[bugzilla-daemon@freedesktop.org: [Bug 3080] libdps and libdpstkare obsolete and should be removed]

[Alan Coopersmith]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> Closed source libraries have no bearing on us: what Adobe does with DPS
> has about as much bearing on us as DirectX, as long as they're not
> releasing the source.

Not that it matters, but what's in the tree now - the client side, did
come from Adobe releasing the client-side source years ago.  You'll notice
their copyright in many of the files.    It was the server side, with the
actual PostScript engine, that was kept closed-source.

> The people still using it can surely go to
> dps.sf.net (or Adobe or whatever, since they're still DPS upstream,
> apparently), and download it, no?

While Adobe's web site still has the DPS docs, I don't think you can find the
source there, nor anyone there willing to do any sort of maintenance on it.

> Do you see the problem here?  If we're to have a 'professional' formal
> process with a committee or something, then we need to have equally
> difficult and stringent standards for *adding* things.  

I think we should require approval of more than just one person with CVS
access for adding major new features to a release train - i.e. new libraries,
programs, extensions, etc. since X.Org will be taking responsibility for them,
even if the original committer gets hit by a bus, loses interest, etc.   I
don't think difficult or stringent is required, just a rough consensus, or
even just something like what you tried here - send out mail, wait a week for
objections, then go ahead.  Experimentation is always free to happen in
branches or other CVS modules without any more process than getting commit
privs or finding someone who does to help you.

I expect we'll get that in part with the modularization - either 
release-wranglers or xorg-arch would approve the list of modules
considered part of the offical X.Org release, and adding a new
module will require one of those groups to be aware and not object.

As for DPS, as I noted in the bug, I think it's entirely reasonable to
simply add "DPS is gone" to the list of incompatible changes in the 7.0
release.   That makes more sense to me than doing useless work to modularize
and then removing in a 7.x release that people would be less likely to
expect incompatible changes in.

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