Xserver driver merging pros & cons

[Stéphane Marchesin]

2011/9/16 Jeremy Huddleston <jeremyhu at apple.com>:
>
> On Sep 16, 2011, at 3:50 AM, Michel Dänzer wrote:
>
>>> Can you be more specific?  When we were discussing this yesterday, it
>>> seemed like the "new development model" was working and that it was no
>>> longer a barrier to this problem.
>>
>> Try getting a review for a non-sexy change, e.g. in EXA. And even in
>> other areas, if it takes more time/effort to get in a bugfix than to fix
>> the bug in the first place, why should one bother? I'm only bothering
>> anymore for bugs that affect users really badly.
>
> While it is true that the number of commits has dropped, that's not necessarily a bad thing.  I did not do exhaustive analysis to see what were reversions and what were addressing introduced regressions which occurred BECAUSE of the old policy.
>
>> Generally there's been too many useful patches languishing indefinitely
>> due to the unrealistic process. Alex said you had slides at XDC showing
>> that the number of changes went down for each recent xserver release.
>> That matches my impression that the new process has been killing
>> momentum, instead of attracting new momentum as had been promised.
>
>
> I decided to do some more mining of data for this discussion.
>
> A sizable portion of the commits in 1.7 and prior were due to a spike in both input and XQuartz.  XQuartz was finally usable on master with 1.7 which ended that deluge.  As Peter briefly mentioned when I had up this slide, many of the input changes were due to reverting changes from 1.6 and then adding it back in to 1.7, so each input commit got counted triple (in to 1.6, out of 1.6, in to 1.7).
>
> Additionally, the number of individual contributors has dropped (by roughly 50%) which does seem to validate Michel's point about there being a barrier to contribution.  I am certainly interested in exploring what we can do to make this process easier, but let's handle that issue separately since it needs to be discussed no matter what the driver integration resolution is.


Well, the issue is not separate. Driver repos are straightforward to
get changes in and therefore can move forward easily. For xserver
changes, with the amount of latency/difficulty involved, people don't
even try.

Stéphane