Looking ahead to the 7.8 katamari

[Alan Coopersmith]

On 06/ 8/12 06:35 AM, Alex Deucher wrote:
> Does anyone care about an official katamari anymore?  Most
> OSes/distros just cherry pick the parts they want anyway.  If no one
> uses them, maybe they are not worth doing anymore?  If there is
> someone that uses them, maybe they can step up to handle them,
> otherwise we can just stick to component releases?

As one of the distro makers who does pull in new component releases as
they happen, the reasons I've still kept putting out katamaris have been
(in approximate order of importance to me):

1) It gets an updated set of documents on the website - I often refer
   people with questions to one of the documents on
	http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/index.html

   We could divorce the docs from the katamari and come up with some other
   scheme to update them - just go back to using /docs/ and update each
   individual doc when changes are ready perhaps?   Something for the people
   working on docs to think about.

2) It gives a chance for a little extra awareness/PR, since it's the sort of
   thing that gets people's attention.   For instance, for this katamari,
   so far google finds postings at:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/X-org-Foundation-releases-X11-release-7-7-1612623.html
http://www.golem.de/news/x-org-x11r7-7-unterstuetzt-multitouch-1206-92384.html
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTExNDk
https://www.linux.com/component/content/article/135-distronews/586910-x11r77-released

    and a link to the announcement on front page of http://lwn.net/ , plus a
    bunch of random blog & twitter mentions.   (And the plug I included for
    XDC2012 in the katamari announcement got echoed in several of them as well.)

3) It gives a simple baseline to discuss, so a distro can say "We have X11R7.7,
   plus Xorg 1.13 and ... driver updates".   In my packages, I still have a few
   that are bundles of multiple Xorg packages - for instance, the Solaris 11
   package "x11-server-utilities" includes xhost, xinput, xmodmap, xprop,
   xrandr, xrdb, xrefresh, xset, xsetroot, showrgb, and xgamma - all of which
   have different version numbers, so we just call it version 7.7.

4) It less us spend less time answering questions from embedded system builders,
   Linux-from-Scratch newbies, etc. trying to assemble a set of modules they can
   use for their custom builds.   The existing distros/OS'es have this well in
   hand, but they're not the only ones doing builds.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-              alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Engineering - http://blogs.oracle.com/alanc