Status of xserver/debrix/modular tree?

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Hello,

out of personal interest, I've been following Xorg's
development since the fork.  I sometimes rebuild xorg
along with several other subprojects hosted at f.d.o.
to see what's up.

Both Mesa and DRI appear to be making very good progress
both in functionality and performance.  Cairo also looks
very active, with Glitz intermittently lagging behind.
Today I've finally seen cairo-gtk-engine in action and
it's very nice.

I'm very confused on where Xserver (kdrive?) and Debrix
are heading: there's little discussion on the public
mailing-lists and very little activity in the CVS
repositories.

The Xserver wiki page says the project is dead, pointing
users to Debrix.  The link to Debrix, however, has
disappeared from FreeDesktop's Software directory and
the Arch repository doesn't work any more.

Actually, the page was still there:
  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fdebrix

...so I found out that Debrix migrated from arch to bazaar.
I tried checking it out, but it's mostly old stuff which
doesn't even build.

Instead, the "dead" xserver project still gets a few
commits every now and then.  It (mostly) works with my
radeon 9200 card with DRI and GLX enabled, but it's not
yet mature enough to replace Xorg.

The modular xlibs and xapps trees seem to receive very
little development.  It also looks like they're not
being kept in sync with the monolitic tree.  The XCB
enabled libX11 would be a nice new feature which already
works fine today.

I'm curious about the future deriction of these projects?
Is there a plan of some kind?  If so, where is it being
discussed?

Unlike other OSS projects such as the Linux Kernel and
GCC, there's very little talking in Xorg's mailing-lists:
most are just dead, with the exception of xorg which
has very little traffic.  Things just seem to "happen"
in CVS as if there was private mail exchange between
a few developers.

Reviewing patches in Bugzilla contributes to the lack
of communication of this development model.

Both Linus Torvalds and Mark Mitchell periodically write
status updates of some kind to keep people focused on
a common goal.  The KDE and Mozilla projects publish
long-term plans.

Never seen anything similar for the Xorg family of
projects.  It's not even clear what the management
roles are and who is in charge for them.

I know Xorg is based on volunteer work.  All OSS
projects are.  I might have overseen something, but
in order to be successful and attract more developers,
Xorg appears to need more coordination/PR work.

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/