Stopping work on EGL and Xgl

[Dane Rushton]

I also am saddened at Jon's departure. Jon, I would like to thank you 
for your efforts.

Due to the nature of open source, the project isn't dead. It's 
hibernating, until other areas (such as input, video memory management) 
get sorted out and someone gets it moving again.

I wrote a few weeks ago that I would have a go at input (I am a
professional software engineer with a couple of years experience, just 
not in open-source development), and triggered quite a long thread about 
how to deal with input in multi-seat situations. The goal seems to be to
produce a daemon (using HAL or whatever) which enforces policy and 
notifies Xservers (Xegl and others) of which devices to use at runtime.

Unfortunately my day job is taking more time than I'd like or am paid 
for, so I haven't had the time to do much yet other than research (or
play WoW on my powerbook!).

In the coming couple of weeks I intend to get some design documentation 
of a possible input system available for peer review.

Cheers
Dane Rushton



Nicola Squartini wrote:
> 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.
>>