Getting xserver patches reviewed

[Jernej Azarija]

Hello!

I've been thinking about exactly the same things over the past month.
The same reasons motivated me to try to hack X code.

> The graphics subsystem, on the other hand, is really where
> Linux lags behind Windows and MacOS X.  Working on it,
> offers a lot of opportunity for improvement that will
> make a big difference.

Agree. I think almost all of userspace (starting from X) should be improved...

> Now, I know I'll get tomatoes from both X and the kernel
> hackers for saying this, but I claim that the X codebase
> would be much *easier* to work with than the kernel.

I'm not really sure about this. I don't have a hard time understanding
basic OS concepts (interrupts, contexts, etc..), while I have quite a
hard time grasping X  architecture design.

> There are *lots* of open newbie tasks such as eliminating
> the excessive use of #ifdef's, switching to C99 types and
> undoing the questionable idea of hiding pointers behind
> typedefs.

Actually, this is how I tried to start. I've created a simple Janitor
page on the wiki :

http://wiki.x.org/wiki/Development/Janitor?highlight=%28janitor%29

describing what should be done and what kind of help is welcome. I've
also tried to submit a simple patch adding error checking for a missed
Xalloc() return value. After about three months, no reply in the
bugzila was made. (I'm 100% this doesn't happen in the kernel
community). In the meantime, I've crawled at random places in X
codebase and found about ~10 memory leaks ,fixed some compiler
warnings and optimized trivial parts of code. But, the initial ignore
got me so unmotivated, that I never submitted a patch...

I'm tempted to say that X hackers community is not as open as the one
of the Linux kernel.