Stopping work on EGL and Xgl

[Nicola Squartini]

I am writing this e-mail because I feel I should do something in favor
of Xegl, which in my opinion is one of the most important project on
Linux, and it's very sad to hear that the initiator of it is leaving. I
followed the xorg mailing-list (and many others) for a while and I know
that you, Jon, worked a lot on it, introducing many new ideas since the
early miniglx. Now that work is going in the right direction  (EGL+Xgl),
is it worth to quit?

Together with my brother I am developing a Linux distribution. We don't
plan to finish it in a year or two, when it will be ready we will
publish it; we are doing it because we enjoy. I think this is the spirit
of free software. We would really like to see Xegl running on our
computers, we would dump xorg-server with great pleasure.

Unfortunately there are many people in the Linux community who are very
conservative, but at the same time there are many who would like to have
an operating system which is competitive with Windows and MacOs. Without
Xegl Linux will always be one step behind the others. I would like
everybody to understand this.
This is the only way for me to help, since I am not a good C programmer.

Regards

On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 19:21 -0400, Jon Smirl wrote: 

> After discussing this with several people I have decided to stop
> working on EGL and Xgl. The recent work on EXA is going to have the
> side effect of pushing out any hope for an Xgl release by a year or
> more.  By extending the 2D drivers to accelerate composite end user
> demand for Xgl will also be reduced.
> 
> I have been donating my full-time effort to this project now for two
> years without pay. I can not justify devoting further time to this
> project without reasonable hope of it reaching completion.
> 
> The basic problem is that only two people (myself and DaveR) are
> working on Xgl. Xgl is way too large for two people to finish. I have
> been trying without success for the last year to attract more people
> to work on Xgl.
> 
> Xegl is at the demo stage on the r200. There are instructions in the
> wiki on how to run it. There are still large amounts of work to do to
> add memory management and FBOs to DRI. The Xegl server also need an
> input system and work done to integrate it into the modular tree.
> 
> I haven't decided what to work on next but it will probably be related
> to HTML browsers.
> 
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