Fault reports and bug fixes and expectations

[Adam Jackson]

On Mon, 2019-06-17 at 10:31 +0000, Wheatley, Martin R wrote:

> If Oracle will only take the Xorg source rather (as opposed to fixing
> it - or even discussing a fix with Xorg - and pushing the fix back to
> Xorg) who and when will the issue be fixed so that I can put pressure
> on Oracle to generate a patch from the new Xorg code thus improving
> the reliability of my control room operation?

The X.Org Foundation does not have development resources of its own.
Individual and corporate contributors do work on the various
components, but usually that work is prioritized by individual or
corporate interest. (For example, my employer has very little interest
in, say, xcalc, and neither do I, so I tend not to notice issues
reported there.) As with many open source projects, patches carry more
weight than bug reports. Changing to gitlab has (hopefully) made it
significantly easier to submit drive-by fixes for issues like this.

To this specific bug: ooh, you can fix this by deletion, my favorite
kind of fix. I think this will resolve it:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/xauth/merge_requests/1

xauth looks like it has a few other minor fixes that have accumulated,
I'll be happy to push out a new release once that MR is resolved. I'm
not especially familiar with Solaris these days, but xauth itself has
changed so little that I suspect you can build it from source without
too much trouble, should you need to. If you need to get the fix
through an authorized support channel, well, talk to them.

- ajax