X server 1.9 release thoughts

Jeremy Huddleston jeremyhu at freedesktop.org
Tue Apr 6 14:43:01 PDT 2010


On Apr 6, 2010, at 11:47, Daniel Stone wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 09:30:47AM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
>> Beyond that, one requirement that I see for merging output drivers  
>> would
>> be to shorten the X server release from the current 6 months down  
>> to 3
>> months or so. Otherwise I feel that the window of time between  
>> hardware
>> release and driver release could become too long. I'm up for this
>> cadence, but it would mean that we'd need to see major patches posted
>> and reviewed in the previous release cycle so that they could be  
>> applied
>> shortly after a release. I don't want to shorten the RC schedule by
>> much. If ABI/API churn is an issue, we could try freezing those for  
>> the
>> 'odd' releases, but I'd rather avoid that as it can artificially
>> constrain development.
>
> Er, is there no reason hardware enable (even if it's not entirely
> fully-featured) can't be done in point releases?

Yeah, I thought the 6-week point release schedule was mainly to  
address this very concern amongst the drivers developers.

I think a 3-month major-release cycle will be very taxing, especially  
considering the increased codebase with drivers.

Another possibility to take some load off of the release manager might  
be allowing "assistant release manager" (or possibly "assistant to the  
release manager" ;>) positions for the drivers.  That way, Keith  
doesn't need to be the gate-keeper for an increasing code-base, and  
the driver developers still have the same manager for their driver in  
its new location as they did in its old location.


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