New Release Manager (Was: Status of xserver/debrix/modular tree?)

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Daniel Stone wrote:

>>>And, as I said, we are in the process of appointing a release manager
>>>for 7.0.
>>
>>I see.  As soon as he's in charge, I'll ask him if we can get
>>a release plan and some guidelines.
> 
> What specifically do you want to find out that's not already avaialble,
> given the general consensus that 7.0 will be a fully modular release?

Well, a good release plan should say which components will
be present in the modular tree, list the tasks that needs
to be done and assign people to specific tasks.

Developers would then know better what they should do.
Collecting feedback would help the RM sketching a
somewhat realistic schedule.

By the way, has the RM issue been discussed at the Xdevcon?
There's no discussion here in the list.  The only thing I
know is that Adam Jackson volunteered and Michel daenzer
supported him.  Nobody else replied.


>>Xorg seems to be able to perform frequent releases too,
>>which is good, but features too often don't match original
>>plans.
> 
> Again, a lot of this has to do with the fact that we're woefully
> undermanned, so the loss of one contributor can totally cripple an
> entire portion of the project.  If we lost Roland Mainz, Xprint would
> fall apart.  If we lost Egbert Eich, I get the feeling int10 would
> disintegrate.  The nVidia driver is done entirely by Mark Vojkovitch,
> with Alan Coopersmith constantly playing with merges there.  The
> Radeon display detection stuff depends almost entirely on Ben
> Herrenschmidt.  And so on, and so forth.
> 
> The problem is that if one person disappears or gets unavoidably busy,
> then entire chunks of the project can just fall off in terms of
> development.  Witness the current situation with debrix, where the code
> is lagging badly behind.

That's sad.  A project as visible and critical as Xorg should
have hackers lining up to join.

Have you read this Slashdot story?

  http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/16/1916250&tid=104&tid=189&tid=106&threshold=5

Sounds like Seth Nickell and other Red Hat hackers are
working on interesting stuff.  Maybe we should get in contact
with them to see if their ongoing efforts could be coordinated
here in the xorg mailing-list?


>>What am I missing?
> 
> Maybe it already works, but my understanding that even accelerated
> direct was not possible if you built the monolithic tree without
> any of the Mesa bits, and then built Mesa out-of-tree.

I've built Xorg with the in-tree copy of Mesa (it doesn't build
with the current CVS version).

Then I've built Mesa and installed it over the old libraries
(libGL, libGLU, r200_dri.so).  Works great.

I've never tried building Mesa-solo, but after reading
the latest news I'll give it a shot.

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