xc/programs considered harmful

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 14:20 -0500, John McCutchan wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 13:51 -0500, Leon Shiman wrote:
> > Daniel -
> > 
> > There  is a procedure already in place for deprecating ANY code. It is part 
> > of X.Org's commitment to stability of the code base.  The Architecture Group 
> > is the place to start; under Paul Anderson's chairmanship they are empowered 
> > to review and propose changes. You should write xorg_arch at x.org.
> > 
> 
> They should be reading and participating on this list then eh? Part of
> the reason for ditching XFree was to avoid this kind of closed circle of
> power wasn't it? I thought the community was going to decide the
> direction of X now. Considering that Daniel is one of the biggest
> participators in the X community, I guess not. 

What really disappoints me here is that modularization has been 
discussed, experimented with, tried out for several years, and nobody
has sat down and wrote down a concrete plan for:

 - How will the code be structured in CVS
 - What will be the released tarballs
 - What are the stages for moving code to match 

If I hadn't talked to people about it in person, I wouldn't believe
that people even had a plan.

Such a plan could be debated upon, refined and agreed upon. I don't
think "if nobody objects I'm going to start moving things" is a 
decent way of making this kind of decision. For one thing, *some*
people will (as we've seen on this thread) object, even if there
is a general consensus.

It's great if development can proceed by consensus, rather than 
having to be voted upon. But I don't see how there could be a 
consensus on something that's just in the head of a small subset
of people. Proceeding to make changes before documenting and 
explaining the plan is just inviting confusion, flamage, and
motion in circles.

Regards,
						Owen

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