State of X.Org Report

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2013, Bart Massey wrote:

>     In keeping with the X.Org goal of about one release per
>     year, Release 7.7 of the X Window System occurred 6 June
>     2012. Release 7.6 was about 1.5 years earlier, in
>     December 2010. However, there is some feeling among the
>     developer community that the "katamari" point releases
>     of all of X are no longer terribly useful, yet are a big
>     consumer of developer resources. Thus, it is likely that
>     these releases will be farther apart in the future, or
>     will cease altogether--not because development pace is
>     decreasing, but because point releases of individual
>     components are a better mechanism in the "new" world of
>     modularized X development.

Does X.org have an automated build and test farm that will prove that 
the important individual components continue to build and work together?

A common problem I see as a package maintainer is mismatch of components 
due to upgrading one X.org component but not some other (missing 
features, missing headers, etc.).  pkg-config dependency checking may 
not reflect accurately the versions required. I have also seen that some 
new version is required even though that new version is not publicly 
released yet (it is in git, but no tarball release).

Maybe the large yearly all of X release is useful as a manual 
confirmation until an automated confirmation is available.

>     Sprint, in March, was a "virtual" online event that
>     produced an "X.Org New Developer Guide" that has not

Where is this? A google search and wiki search doesn't find it for me.  
(I do see ModularDevelopersGuide.) Is it in the wiki or in git?

Thank you very much for your report. Was there any board discussion 
about licensing? In particular, the concern I see is with various driver 
support changed from MIT-licensed X.org code to using code provided in 
the Linux kernel tree (such as under drivers/gpu/drm). Much of that 
newer Linux code is MIT-licensed, but many files are missing licenses, 
some are marked with GPL2 or GPL2-or-later, and some are MIT-licensed 
but tagged with EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL.

  Jeremy C. Reed

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