Xorg 7.4 release plan

[Adam Jackson]

Right, we've been slackers for a bit here, it's time to ship something
that works.  My motives are not entirely altruistic here, I really want
something that isn't a git snapshot in Fedora 9, but we're way past the
initially projected release date by now [1], so it's time to shape up
anyway.

Since I'm aiming for F9, the schedule proposed below is designed to work
with that constraint.  The schedule for F9 is here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/Schedule

Briefly summarized as:

March 4: Feature freeze
April 8: Development freeze
April 22: Release candidate
April 29: Final release

Like all schedules, this is probably optimistic, there's probably two
weeks or so of slip in there.  But it makes for a pretty good timeline,
so we'll stick with it.  Astute observers will note that those dates are
all Tuesdays, so to give some slack time between X snapshots and
downstream, I'd like to move our deadline dates to the preceeding
Fridays:

February 29: Branch 1.4.99.901, no new features
March 14..21: .902, enter code slush, review if unsure
April 4: .903, freeze, approved fixes only
April 18: .991, hard freeze, showstoppers only
April 25: xserver 1.5 and 7.4 katamari

Those of you watching the xorg-team@ alias may have noticed a recent
flurry of blocker bug nominations.  The blocker bug for 7.4 is:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10101

There's a lot of stuff on there.  Much of it should not be difficult to
fix, given the existence of either a reproducer or a proof-of-concept
patch.  If you have bugs that you think should be blockers, please add
them to the bug.

Outside the blocker, there are several outstanding issues that, in my
mind, need to be addressed in one form or another before 7.4.

pciaccess is not done.  We still have ~20 drivers that haven't been
ported, and some of them are not quite trivial to convert.  This needs a
champion in a serious way.  I'm convinced enough of pciaccess' value
that I don't intend to revert it for 7.4, but we need to make progress
here.

Input is not stable.  Since the last time I rebased X in fedora, I've
had complaints about inability to switch keymaps, broken control-alt-foo
combos, stuck axes on mice, keymap changes disappearing at runtime, etc.
We never shipped 1.4 in fedora, but afaict XKB was fairly broken there
too.  I'm really loathe to revert XKB to its 1.3 implementation, but in
the absence of fixes, I'll do what needs doing.  Likewise input hotplug
needs a sensible transition plan before I can really ship it.

The X-SELinux work is not viable yet.  I'm fine with leaving it in place
and simply configuring it off by default, but there's both not enough
good policy and too many remaining implementation bugs to consider it as
is.  Starting gnome-session should not throw BadWindow.

RANDR 1.2's initial configuration heuristic is garbage.  I'm working on
this as I get time, and I hope to have something better by the end of
the week, but I can't ship the current heuristic with a clear
conscience.

These are just bugs.  They're fixable.  And we need to fix them.

In light of discussions about various people's time commitments at LCA,
I'm going to be taking the release manager role for this one, with Eric
and Daniel acting as deputies for things like patch review.  My interest
is primarily in the server component; driver maintainers, if there's a
specific branch I should be looking at for 7.4 inclusion, please notify
me, otherwise I'll assume releases should happen from git master.

Questions?  Comments?  Favorite burger topping?

- ajax
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