xorg maintenance: maintainer proposal

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 12/18/23 14:53, Thomas Adam wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 13, 2023 at 03:40:12PM -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> I'd suggest looking through the open bugs & MR's on
>> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/
>> and maybe see if you can help triage, reproduce, or even fix some bugs;
>> or review or test some long open MR's.  There could also be work done
>> around adding more testing to our CI infrastructure to help any new
>> maintainers gain confidence in proposed MRs.

> 
> I could do with knowing what/how the labels on MRs and issues are used.  I
> don't see to have the ability to add/change labels on MRs or issues -- but it
> would help in triaging some of those, IMO.

I'm not that sure myself, so hopefully someone else can answer that.

>> new maintainer today. But long term, it would be nice to make a 24.x
>> release series to replace the 21.x release series and publish everything
>> that's accumulated in the development trunk in the past 3 years.
> 
> I presume this would be across most of the repositories under the 'xorg'
> projects and not jsut the xserver repository?

No, a Xserver 24.x release would just involve the xserver repository.

All the other repositories under https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/
are released independently of the xserver, and most don't have that much
waiting to be released.  A few have dedicated maintainers who decide when
to release them - you can see those listed in:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/doc/xorg-docs/-/blob/master/MAINTAINERS
A few more are declared fully dead, as documented in the above file and
https://lore.kernel.org/distributions/1ea25603-171c-062e-bc02-bcdfc3acd01a@oracle.com/T/#u
For everything else, there's a few of us who do releases as necessary, as
you can see in the release announcements on
https://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-announce/

While more people helping with that would be welcome, it's not like we have
a huge backlog, since there's not a lot of change in those code bases to be
released.

> Indeed -- as it's been three years already, is there a roadmap or set of
> issues which you're waiting to be fixed before that decision is made?   Or is
> it more a case of things need to be planned first?

It's more a case of no one wanting to put in the effort to make releases of
it - there's stuff checked into the master branch, and most of it already
released in Xwayland releases, but which there's no release plans or people
doing testing and making beta releases for others to test.

-- 
         -Alan Coopersmith-                 alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
          Oracle Solaris Engineering - https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris