Ansification of X.Org code & other cleanup work

[Alan Coopersmith]

>From a comment in a patch Peter recently submitted:
> libXpm is one of the libraries that still could need ANSIfication,
> 	I'd offer some help if you tell me to do so.

And this has come up on #xorg-devel recently and in patches submitted by
Paulo in the past...(and probably a couple times a year since we started
X.Org)...

In general, I think everyone agrees conversion of the remaining bits
of code that use K&R/pre-ANSI-C89 style function prototypes & declarations
to C89 is a good thing (provided it's done correctly [1]), but that none
of the people doing most of the work on Xorg have much time to help with it.
The same applies to much other "janitorial" type work, like cleaning up
gcc warnings and all the bugs with the janitor keyword ([2]), and all the
patches sitting in bugzilla ([3]) or the mailing list archives.  We get patches
submitted by people like Paulo & Peter, and while some of us try to get through
the backlog in our spare time, the backlog of them grows faster than we can get
time to get through them.

I'd really like to encourage the people who want to tackle these issues to get
someone to help them apply their first few patches, then apply for git commit
access so you can commit them directly, because if you wait for the few of us
trawling the submitted patches to get to them, many of your patches will be
uselessly out-of-sync with the code by the time we get to them and you'll be
seeing those errors for months or longer until we do.

If someone wanted to organize a "janitorial squad" to tackle these and help
new people work through them to get to the point where they were ready for
commit access, we'd love you forever (or at least until you turn us down
when we then volunteer you to be the next release manager).

[1] http://invisible-island.net/ansification/index.html
[2] 41 open bugs:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=janitor&product=Xorg&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED
[3] 122 open bugs, though many patches aren't keyworded:
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=patch&product=Xorg&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering