1.17 status and schedule

[Aaron Plattner]

On 01/04/2015 05:35 PM, Keith Packard wrote:
> Ok, it's (almost) the first working day of the year, and we're supposed
> to be shipping 1.17. I think we're quite close, but I want to make sure
> everyone is ready for the release before it happens.
>
>  From my list of pending patches, we've got:
>
> glamor:
>          some optimizations for lighter-weight hardware. Very useful,
>          don't seem like material for 1.17.
>
> modesetting:
>          There has been work on getting page flipping going here; given
>          that modesetting is all new functionality for 1.17, we can't
>          have any regressions, so if that code looks solid and is useful,
>          I'd be tempted to include it.
>
> prime:
>          Aaron posted a pair of patches dealing with GPU screen handling;
>          no review yet, but it seems like a useful fix if it is obvious,
>          correct and not scary. Review needed.

I mentioned it on IRC but I should probably say it here too for the 
record: I don't think this should go into 1.17.  It's a big enough 
change in behavior that some soak time on master is probably warranted. 
  We can always backport it to server-1.17-branch later if it's good. 
(It's not an ABI break).

> Oracle:
> 	Some warning fixes related to dtrace and DMX. These should wait
>          until after 1.17.
>
> present:
>          I posted a patch series that fixes Present interactions with
>          compositing managers. It seems 'obviously' correct to me, but it
>          hasn't seen any review. Unless someone gets really excited about
>          this, it'll have to wait until after 1.17.
>
> xwayland:
>          Tomasz posted a patch to move some shm file descriptors out of
>          the low range used for X clients; I've seen no discussion of
>          this, but it looks like it'd be nice to have
>
>          Daniel posted a patch series to clear keys that were pressed
>          when switching back to X, and Peter and I agreed that the
>          results were useful, but that the implementation could be done a
>          bit differently with better results. I posted an
>          Xwayland-specific patch that papered over the worst problems.
>          Any of the more complete solutions seem a bit too invasive to me
>          for 1.17, but the simple hack seems like a good interim solution
>          if someone wants to push it.
>
> randr:
>          Tiling properties. This is (alas) an ABI change, so it will need
>          to wait until after 1.17. I think we'll want to merge this along
>          with the other randr changes to add 'monitors' so that we can
>          make gnome work properly with most 4k monitors.
>
> Beyond 1.17, if we can get a bunch of the pending glamor, modesetting
> and randr changes merged soon after the release, I'd like to consider
> doing a 1.18 release on a shorter schedule than 6 months. We've finally
> reached the point where a pile of new feature code is waiting to land
> once the merge window opens. We may be able to have a useful release
> with a very short merge window.
>
> As always, this is just a suggestion.  Failing a fairly strong rough
> consensus, we should plan on retaining our existing 6 month schedule.