X server 1.9 release thoughts

[Luc Verhaegen]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 09:30:47AM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> 
> First off, thanks to everyone involved in the 1.8 release; it was a
> pleasure to work with you. I'm hoping everyone else is as happy as I am
> about our new release process, it seemed to me that we saw a lot more
> active review and discussion about proposed patches this time around.
> 
> For version 1.9, I'm planning on doing things in much the same way, if
> people have suggestions on how we can improve things, please post them
> so we can get things settled before we get too far into the release.
> 
> Ok, so now for the details about the 1.9 release itself.
> 
> First off, I'd like to get a start on making things easier to build
> for people interested in testing the server or new drivers. I'm still
> interested in getting drivers pulled back into the server itself at some
> point, but it seems like an important and trivial first step will be to
> merge all of the protocol headers into one package. I'll get started on
> that and post a pointer to a merged repository for review.
> 
> Beyond that, one requirement that I see for merging output drivers would
> be to shorten the X server release from the current 6 months down to 3
> months or so. Otherwise I feel that the window of time between hardware
> release and driver release could become too long. I'm up for this
> cadence, but it would mean that we'd need to see major patches posted
> and reviewed in the previous release cycle so that they could be applied
> shortly after a release. I don't want to shorten the RC schedule by
> much. If ABI/API churn is an issue, we could try freezing those for the
> 'odd' releases, but I'd rather avoid that as it can artificially
> constrain development.
> 
> For 1.9, I'd like to shorten the schedule a bit, if that works for other
> people. It seems like releasing around mid-late August would better
> align with the Beta schedules for Fedora, Ubuntu and MeeGo. If that
> seems reasonable to most people, I'd like to propose the following
> schedule:
> 
> Merge window closes:        2010-6-1
> Non-critical bug deadline:  2010-8-1
> Release:                    2010-8-20
> 
> I don't think there are any major changes planned for this release, so
> this shorter merge window seems like it should be sufficient. Nor do I
> necessarily think that this would also mean that the X.org release date
> should be moved in; having the X server ready *before* the X.org release
> seems like a good idea to me. I'll be doing periodic release candidates
> starting with the close of the merge window.
> 
> This schedule would mean that anyone with changes they've been working
> on should get them posted now. Independent of the 1.9 release schedule,
> I'd like to encourage people to post patches as soon as possible anyway;
> there's no reason to wait until the feature merge window is open to get
> code reviewed, the merge window is supposed to be about getting changes
> lined up for the server release.
> 

Hi Keith.