xc/programs considered harmful

[Shane Ley]

I assume that most people who need to maintain the old monolith will 
need to do-so with 6_8 branch, right? This proposal does not affect them 
in any way.

Ultimately this whole thing seems to come down to modular release? yes/no.

If yes, it makes little sense to support development of modular, but at 
the same time encourage people to maintain anything other than 6_8 
branch of the monolith. It seems to me to actually be counter-productive 
to allow continued development on a tree that's transitioning to another 
tree.

I think the xorg board should take a good look at where most of the 
recent changes have come from, and support the active developers of such 
  work, to avoid the stagnating of development.

Regards, Shane.

Kevin E Martin wrote:

> Many of us have talked about this move to a modular tree but most are
> currently caught up in the 6.8.2 release.  I too would like to see us
> move forward on the modularization front, but I don't think that
> removing bits from the monolithic tree is the right answer to get us
> moving forward.
> 
> There will still be people that need to maintain the old monolithic
> tree, and I think it is fine for them to do so.  The main reason for
> this is that there will be vendors that will take time to move their
> internal X development and releases over to a modular system -- not
> everyone can switch as fast as you or I can.  And, removing useful bits
> from that tree would cause significant problems for those vendors that
> are not ready to move.  I think a better proposal would be to map out a
> transition plan, keep the old monolithic tree around until the
> transition is complete, and then deprecate it after we've shown that a
> modular release is just as stable and reliable as the old monolithic
> ones (or hopefully much more stable with better features).
> 
> I would like to see a concerted effort to define exactly how the
> transition will occur, but I agree with others that perhaps it is going
> to be difficult to get consensus right now since many people are about
> to leave for the holidays and some already have.  There are several
> proposals that have been floating around, which should be discussed.
> Keith Packard and I (and others) talked about one at a recent meeting,
> which I will try to write up over the weekend so that we can discuss it
> here.
> 
> Kevin