Xlibre 25.0 summer solstice release

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

Releasing XLibre 25.0.0.0 - fork of the Xorg Xserver

Today it's summer solstice, the Sol's highest point of the year.
Great time for the initial release of Xlibre Xserver - a fork of the 
Xorg Xserver, coming with a massive code cleanup and new features. 
Besides cleaning up a huge amount of technical debt, various fixes for
non-Linux platforms, the most important changes (IMHO) are:

a) Xnamespace extension: a novel approach for isolating clients from
    different security domains (eg. containers) into separate X11
    namespaces, where they can't hurt each other (for cases where
    Xsecurity from 1996 isn't sufficient)
b) Xnest ported to xcb - no more dependency on old Xlib anymore
c) per-ABI driver directories (allows distros installing multiple ABIs 
at the same time, eg. for smoother upgrades)
d) lots of small fixes and cleanups - too many to list them all here.
e) several CVE fixes

This fork became necessary, because it's the expressed wish of the
current Xorg group's majority (IBM/Redhat) to abandon the project, let
it rot forever, and block any substantial contributions, let alone new
features. The sudden banning and censorship of all my work on
freedesktop.org by IBM/Redhat employees, right after first news on a
planned fork came out, should have cleared all doubt about that. They
seem to believe that nobody's supposed to fork any of "their" projects,
that's why we're doing exactly that.

For quite a year, I've put a tremendous amount of work for backporting a
hundred of MRs back for across 1k commits onto xorg master,  but finally
it's not worth at all spending any more time with that, if nothing
substantial getting merged ever. If Xorg wants to die, so be it. But
Xlibre will live on.

Since this is the first major release of the Xserver since years (with
about 3k commits in between), there might be some yet unnoticed bugs.
So this .0.0.0 release is considered beta. Feel free to play around and
give feedback ☺. I'm especially inviting people from all distros/
operating systems to check it out and let me know what you need in
order to make it work smoothly. And all of those having their own forks,
extra modules, etc - let's come together and collaborate.

The X development - whether Xfree86 or Xorg - quite always has been
elitist circle, not actually warmly welcoming new contributors. Today,
Xorg suffers from similar problems as Xfree86 did - it's in similar
situation that's been the reaons for forking Xorg from Xfree86.

Xlibre is going to change that: this project is inclusive to anybody
who's willing to make good contributions. It doesn't matter which
country you're coming from, your politicial views, your race, your sex,
your age, your food menu, whether you wear boots or heels, whether
you're furry or fairy, Conan or McKay, comic character, a small furry
creature from Alpha Centauri, or just an boring average person.
Anybody's welcomed, who's interested in bringing X forward.

Source code can be found at:
    Repo: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
    Tag:  xlibre-xserver-25.0.0.0

Note: as usual for major Xserver releases, ABI changed, so (most)
drivers need recompilation. The only one we cannot recompile is Nvidia -
we're taking special care for not breaking it (as long as it's still 
needed).

Since Xorg people are currently sneaking in subtle incompatibilities
into module ABI between Xorg and Xlibre. Please make sure you're using
our repos (instead of Redhat's ones). Our driver tags are all prefixed 
with "xlibre-xf86-..."

See README file for more information.

Finally, many thanks to the whole community that had been growing so
massively in just a few days and giving so much support. And special
thanks for all the great contributions, especially debugging and
retaining compatibility with the proprietary NVidia drivers.


have fun & happy summer solstice, to all people around the globe :)

--mtx

-- 
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Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info at metux.net -- +49-151-27565287