xc/programs considered harmful

[Alan Coopersmith]

Ely Levy wrote:
> Anyhow how did the board got to the point that it doesn't talk on the most
> active developer list?How come it doesn't share and invite people to
> specific discussions that might intrest them?
> I think in that case the board is doing a bad job and being isolated from
> the rest of the community, it's the board responsiblity to feed the
> developers community NOT the other way around.

Most of the Architecture Board is here and participating.   Do you even know
who the board members are?

To refresh your memory, the board members elected in June were:
     Alan Coopersmith, Egbert Eich, Jim Gettys, Stuart Kreitman,
     Keith Packard, James McQuillan, Leon Shiman

Of those, Jim McQuillan is the only one I've not seen actively involved in
the discussions on the freedesktop lists or in the r-w calls.   (And these
are obviously some of the most active people in the community - Egbert put
the 6.7.0 release together, Keith provided several of the extensions that
were big features for 6.8.0, Jim organized the developer conference we held
in April, Leon put together the X.Org booths and talks at conferences around 
the world like LinuxWorld, and Stuart is very active in the organizational 
side of the X.Org Foundation.  Compared to them, I'm a bit of a slacker,
only contributing smaller patches, like Solaris support, fixes from Sun's
trees, and bringing in the Nvidia driver changes from Mark Vojkovich.)

> then make public on this list what discussions are happening on the board
> lists, 

Sure.   For the last month or so, the following discussions have happened
on the Archicteture Board lists & calls:
	<NONE>!

The last topics discussed were updating the standards to include Marcus
Kuhn's proposed Unicode/UTF-8 enhancements, such as using Unicode to map
new keycode values so we stopped reinventing the wheel everytime someone
wants to support a new language.

The Architecture Board is mainly about defining the standards & 
specifications - most of the implementation details are left to
the release-wranglers.

 > or even better make a digest so developers could easily know
> what is being discussed and what was talked about?

The mailing lists are publically subscribable and I think the archives
are public.   (Yes, they're hosted at the opengroup's annoyingly different
and sometimes broken sophocles list server, but I think that's a Board of
Directors decision, not ours.)

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