xc/programs considered harmful

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 12:54 -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> Around 15 o'clock on Dec 17, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > What really disappoints me here is that modularization has been 
> > discussed, experimented with, tried out for several years, and nobody
> > has sat down and wrote down a concrete plan for:
> > 
> >  - How will the code be structured in CVS
> >  - What will be the released tarballs
> >  - What are the stages for moving code to match 
> 
> This is putting the cart before the horse.  Until we have an actual 
> commitment from X.org (however that is done) that release 'foo' will be 
> modular, any planning for modularization is strictly navel gazing.

I don't think people even know what "modularization" means; yes,
it means that an X.org release would involve more than one tarball and
more than one CVS module, but that's not a level of detail that would
allow someone to formulate a position on the idea.

And how could there be a commitment to modularization for a particular
release without an idea of what work is involved? 

> We have to get help from everyone involved, even those vehemently 
> opposed to modularization, to make sure the system will work for them.  
> Right now, we just hear about how 'environment foo' or 'system bar' will 
> break irrepairibly as a result of modularization instead of patches to 
> make it work again.
> 
> There's no way we can get rough concensus about how modularization should 
> work until we have rough concensus that it should happen at all.

I think a specific plan, even if got completely reworked afterwords,
would go a long way towards building that consensus.

Regards,
						Owen

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