xorg maintenance: maintainer proposal

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 12/10/2023 4:26 AM, Thomas Adam wrote:> So, I'm probably going to 
sound absolutely crazy for suggesting this,
> but I don't want to let xorg dwindle just yet -- hence I would like to
> put myself forward -- formally -- to maintain xorg, whenever that time
> is right.  Sooner rather than later would be my preference.
> 
> I've looked at how things are structured in Gitlab, and everything
> seems really sensible.  But obviously this is likely a herculean task
> -- so I'd be looking to work with anyone who can show me the ropes and
> help suggest any priorities around outstanding MRs, etc.

While we don't have a well defined process for becoming a maintainer for
the X.Org projects, we have historically expected people to get involved
first, not just be anointed.  (There are some exceptions around vendor
maintained drivers for their hardware/software, but that's about it.)

For starters, I'm assuming you're just looking at the xserver repo
itself, which includes the Xorg, Xvfb, Xnest, Xephyr, Xwin, & Xquartz
servers, plus the modesetting driver for Xorg.  Most of the Xorg drivers
are in separate repos with their own maintainers (or lack thereof) and
varying degrees of life in them.

I'd suggest looking through the open bugs & MR's on
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/
and maybe see if you can help triage, reproduce, or even fix some bugs;
or review or test some long open MR's.  There could also be work done
around adding more testing to our CI infrastructure to help any new
maintainers gain confidence in proposed MRs.

Unfortunately, the most complete guide I've seen to the X server source
code is from X11R5 and thus now over 30 years out of date - some of the
basic structure, like the dix vs. mi vs. ddx breakdown still applies,
but it doesn't cover any of the current ddx layers under hw/*
Info about that book can be seen at
https://www.amazon.com/Window-System-Server-Version-Release/dp/0139727531/ref=sr_1_10

More up-to-date, but less complete docs can be found at
https://www.x.org/releases/current/doc/index.html (under "Server-side"),
https://www.x.org/wiki/DeveloperStart/ ,
https://www.x.org/wiki/Documentation/ , and in the doc subdirectories
spread around the xserver git repo.  Beware that all may be somewhat out
of date, as it's been about a decade since there was last much effort
being put into updating the docs, and there were always gaps where some
changes weren't well documented.

Right now, we've still got people making new releases of the xorg-server
package when we have to publish security fixes, as Peter did yesterday,
so it's not like it's in immediate need of having someone declared as a
new maintainer today. But long term, it would be nice to make a 24.x
release series to replace the 21.x release series and publish everything
that's accumulated in the development trunk in the past 3 years.

And of course, that's just my point of view - others will have their own.

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris