[Xcb] Thinking towards 7.6 katamari, including xcb

[Daniel Stone]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 10:44:35AM +0900, Keith Packard wrote:
> Excerpts from Alan Coopersmith's message of Thu Oct 22 05:36:30 +0900 2009:
> > The current Xserver 1.8 schedule calls for it to release on 2010-3-31.
> > If we stick to the 6 month cadence well, then 1.9 should be released
> > on 2010-9-31.  (Though I still think it should be called 2.0 if the
> > drivers do merge back into the xserver tarball.)
> 
> I'm hoping we can pull the 1.9 release in by three months and having a
> very short merge window that just adds the drivers back without other
> significant changes. To make this work, we'd need to see trees with
> drivers merged back well before the 1.8 release date. Driver
> maintainers with an interest in having their driver integrated in 1.9
> should consider posting merged trees for review in the next few months.

What? Why?

If 7.6 in December 2010 seems like a good idea, then what's the point of
doing 1.9 in September 2010? Is the thinking to ram all the features we
need for the next year in to 1.8, do a short 1.9, seriously[0] maintain
it as a stable branch and keep it going and ship 7.6 with a more
plausible 1.9.5 or thereabouts, and then do the feature dance again for
1.10?

If so, is this something we want to think about doing long-term? (If so,
we might want to invert our cycles to stick with the x.y : y ->
odd/unstable, even/stable convention used by pretty much every other
open source project ever.)

> > I'd suggest then we plan on the 7.6 katamari releasing in early
> > October 2010, close to one year after 7.5.
> 
> That seems like a good schedule. One thing I'd like to see is far
> fewer packages released just before the katamari though; can you say
> what kind of issues you've seen resolved by the updated modules?

Is there any advantage to leaving them sit in git with no release
forever? In an ideal world, they'd all be maintained, but realistically
they're pretty much all maintained by the current release manager.

> > Due to the recent change to xlsclients (and suggested similar changes to
> > other clients that still need to be written), the 7.6 katamari will probably
> > be the first to have a hard requirement on XCB support - sometime during
> > the next year we should decide if we want XCB to remain a separate thing
> > we depend on or whether we want to work with the XCB maintainers to include
> > it in our release process as a core katamari component.
> 
> I'd say xcb should be part of the katamari; I don't see any
> significant issues here, we can just package it up and include it.

+1

(And +1 to the Dec 2010 schedule as well.  Not only does it sound
 plausible and give us more time to get our user[1]-facing APIs as good
 as possible while letting us rip the server to shreds, I don't see
 anyone else stepping up to do the thankless katamari work.)

Cheers,
Daniel

[0]: _Seriously_.
[1]: External libraries/programs.
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