Wiki / Documentation cleanup and X development IRC channel [Was Re: Status of xserver/debrix/modular tree?]

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Shawn Starr wrote:

> As discused on #freedesktop:
> 
> Please send me any broken Links on the Wiki page.  I'm going to help out by 
> starting to clean up the pages and add more information about how people can 
> get involved.

Thank you!


> There really is a need for people, of the people working on Xorg, they are all 
> busy coding. They don't have much time to work on the wiki page(s), 
> documentation updates and such.

True.  Using a Wiki for f.d.o. was a very good idea in my opinion
as it makes it extremely easy to keep the site up to date.

I would suggest making it a requirement to update wiki pages when
consistently with user-visible changes.


> As for documentation, I really like what the GNOME/KDE people are doing in 
> terms of documenting the X APIs in a nice, clean stylized web page layout. If 
> we can make documentation that has examples of how to use the different 
> libraries we can attract more people.

Maybe we could import their documentation infrastructure...
or ask them for cooperatation to do it on f.d.o.


> A link mentioned on #freedesktop is a very good starting point:
> 
> http://www.iecn.u-nancy.fr/~torri/files/xcb/doc/index.html

I had read that tutorial some time ago and thought it would
have been better placed on the freedesktop site.


> Having documentation like this for the rest of X would seriously make 
> understanding the X server and its libraries much easier.
> 
> What does everyone think?

I'm very glad to see this happening.

Another suggestion: the Software page is cluttered with many
lesser/unfinished projects.  I'd suggest moving them to a
subpage instead and sorting the remaining links by importance
instead of alphabetically.

Other sites hosting many projects do that:

  http://www.apache.org/
  http://sources.redhat.com/


Another thing: many project pages are quite longish, with very
little structure.  This makes it hard for users to find
important information such as release tarballs, mailing-lists,
etc.).  I'd suggest splitting up these pages and moving
important links near the top of the main page.


>>Both Linus Torvalds and Mark Mitchell periodically write
>>status updates of some kind to keep people focused on
>>a common goal.  The KDE and Mozilla projects publish
>>long-term plans.
> 
> 
> The problem with this right now is since Xorg is going modular, we need people 
> to sign up to take responsibility of the various components. But for that to 
> happen, people need to understand what they are going to take maintainership 
> of.  I don't know how that would work since the xlibs (Xrender, Xcursor, 
> Xrandr, Xss and such) may be constantly changing. When a new X release comes 
> out, each of the various modular libraries would be captured for a new X 
> Window System release.  There would need a lot of coordination between each 
> Release Manager/Maintainer to make sure everything would be ready for a new X 
> release.

That's true.  It happens in GCC too, but it's not that hard
to get it to work: the RM just needs to announce what the
current plan is, and local maintainers must be consious of
the current policy for committing changes to CVS.

If the tree is currently in regression fix only, sexy patches
are delayed until they're allowed again.

In GCC, every developer is allowed to make a branch in CVS
for experimental work.  The only requirement is that the
branch be documented here: http://gcc.gnu.org/cvs.html .
It's good practice to keep posting patches to gcc-patches@
so the others are aware of what's going on.



>>I know Xorg is based on volunteer work.  All OSS
>>projects are.  I might have overseen something, but
>>in order to be successful and attract more developers,
>>Xorg appears to need more coordination/PR work.
> 
> Come help then,  nurture the baby and it will grow :-)

Thank you, I really wish I had more time and experience
to contribute code, but at this time I can't do much.

Anyway, starting this thread seems to have helped
somewhat :-)

-- 
  // Bernardo Innocenti - Develer S.r.l., R&D dept.
\X/  http://www.develer.com/