Official protest against bug 1060 / was: Re: Away for a few days..

[Alan Coopersmith]

I know I agreed to it with great reluctance, and believe others did as
well, because we were not able to discuss it with anyone who knew the code
and its details since Roland was unavailable and we did not know if he
would be back before the release.   I believe that now that he is back
we should discuss this more, though it is dangerously close to the release
date to be making changes.  We understood there were various alternatives
to keep everyone happy, but no one available had the time or knowledge of
the code to do more than back it out so that the release work could continue.
The timing of this issue just worked against everyone here.   It highlights
that we need to get people more involved in watching and testing the CVS
tree through the entire cycle, not just in the weeks leading up to a release,
so that if disagreements like this pop up they can be solved when there is
still time for both sides to present their arguments and proposals and come
to a solution agreeable to both sides.

As I remember there are two arguments against this change:
   - Some people want the ability to build without Xprint support, which
     they have had in previous releases.
   - Many people consider Xaw to be legacy code that should not be
     enhanced further, since doing so encourages use when we should
     be discouraging it.  (Though no one was so much in favor of
     discouraging Xaw that they were volunteering to port all the Xaw
     apps in the tree to a newer toolkit.)

There was also discussion about adding apps such as xmore to the tree when
the long-term goal of many people is to break the X.Org tree into many small
trees, not make the monolithic tree even bigger so that modularization requires
even more work, but that did not go anywhere beyond a general agreement that
we should think about ressurecting the old "contrib" tree for things that are
useful, but not required to be part of the core X distribution.

	-alan-

Leon Shiman wrote:
> roland, et al,
> 
> i am in sympathy with roland's official protest, but was not in aposition to 
> argue the details alone. 
> 
> I believe this is a very serious issue, and should not be dismissed on the 
> grounds of actions on the wrangler's calls.
> 
> it is a bad precedent to set, in my opinion.
> 
> you may also all recall that i was concerned on those calls to guarantee 
> that this issue was not closed by any immediate actions. 
> 
> i cannot post to the fdo lists, therefore I am writing to the board list, 
> but copying alan coopersmith, who is a member of the architecture group.
> 
> if roland sends me a telephone number, i can discuss with him directly from 
> ludwigsburg.
> 
> leon
> 


-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering