What's up with xgl?

[Adam Jackson]

On Thursday 22 December 2005 16:57, Hanno Böck wrote:
> Now I read in the blog of aaron seigo that xgl development is happening on
> a closed basis:
> http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2005/12/wouldnt-be-it-be-nice.html

The only people who can speak to Novell's position on xgl development with any 
authority are Novell themselves.  So please don't speculate, it doesn't do 
anyone any good.

There were significant technical barriers to getting xgl merged into the 
modular tree, such that there was simply no way it would happen for 7.0.  
Among them were the diverged GLX implementation, and the "same source 
different build" dictum which would have required xgl to be buildable from 
6.9 as well.

There haven't been any checkins to the xgl DDX in the old modular X server 
tree for a few months.  This does not necessarily mean that people have 
stopped working on it.  It doesn't even necessarily mean that the developers 
have "taken it closed".  Heads-down development time is simply a reality, 
even for open projects, and if the developers feel their work is incomplete 
or not ready for public consumption then that's their right.  There are many 
examples of highly successful open source projects that simply were not 
available to the public before their initial release - Mozilla, just as an 
example.

Speaking purely for myself, I haven't been working on xgl stuff nearly as much 
as I had been, or wanted to, because I was trying to get 7.0 out the door.  
Release freezes do have a chilling effect on commits of new hot code and I 
expect the modular world to alleviate that effect.

> And, if aseigo is right (nobody has "officialy" denied or approved his
> entry), what does that mean for the future of xgl?

The future of _any_ X project is the same as it's always been.  If you work on 
it, it will happen.  If people work in different directions and don't 
cooperate on a given feature then it will take longer for that feature to 
happen and the user community will suffer as a result while the efforts 
converge.  If any given party stops contributing open code, well, tough for 
them, it's not like their commits can be undone.  hw/xgl exists, work from 
it.

I will continue to work on enabling X on GL in the open code, and I suspect 
I'm not alone there.  Political debates about who's playing nicely with whom 
don't get development done any faster, so let's not have them, k?

That cuts both ways.  Don't start those debates, and don't give cause for them 
to exist.

- ajax
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