Modularization mailing list and initial strawman proposal

[Kevin E Martin]

On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 02:26:00PM -0500, Jim Gettys wrote:
> The strategy Gnome and KDE to handle integration of components is to do
> time based releases of the aggregated components, that are released
> themselves on their own schedules.  There is additional build and
> integration tests done for those releases, and checking for cross tool
> consistency.

Yes.  In case it's not clear from the proposal, the plan that we're
working toward for X.Org releases is the same as Jim described above.
Moving to a modular tree is the first step.  Perhaps I should expand on
it a little more in the next proposal update.

> > Agreed.  Though this also argues for smaller, more focused releases in the 
> > future.
> 
> Large parts of what we ship don't change from release to release;
> including the same version of many such packages into the roll up
> releases is a low energy option, or we can decide to have some parts of
> the distribution update more frequently than others.

That's an interesting question.  I lean toward including all parts of
the tree in major and minor roll-up releases -- even those that haven't
changed since the previous version or those that won't have a new
version ready in time for the roll-up release.  However, for patch
releases, I think it would make sense to ship only those packages that
have changed since the last major/minor release.

Kevin