[forum] XFree86's Future and thoughts and suggestions

[Stuart Anderson]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Shawn Starr wrote:

> I'm pleased to see a central location now to submit patches. I used to see
> them head to Xpert so I'm out of the loop on that.

There has always been a central location. The Xpert list has never been
it though.

> Right, but we don't even know what those quality guidelines are really.

They need to be put in writing before opening up cvs access significantly.
Right now, the guality guideline are based on good common sense of a small
number of people that mostly agree.

>
> CVS-HEAD by definition isn't supposed to work, I'm amazed that it really does
> :-)

I don't know whose definition you are using, but it's not mine 8-). HEAD
should always wrok with a few occasional exception in the hours immediately
following a very significant change.

> Thats fair enough, We should have some sort of QA much like Mozilla does to
> test out things no?

Yes, we should.

> This is true, I surely wouldn't want everyone to be able to commit to the
> tree, this would cause poor code and degrade XFree86.

But this is what it sounds like a lot of people are asking for.

> Perhaps we should delegate who owns what and then work from there on?

Yes, we should.

> But, I don't know who maintains the X11 library etc, someone should be
> delegated -- should they wish to do it -- the component so we can split tasks
> up easier.

No one is really maintaining some areas like that. The code hasn't changed
significantly in years. On the other hand, becasue it isn't changing much,
it wouldn't be too difficult for one person to be responsible for an
unusually large chunk of the code. In fact, this is pretty much what is
happening with David having to catch everything that isn't picked up by
someone else.

                                Stuart

Stuart R. Anderson                               anderson@netsweng.com
Network & Software Engineering                   http://www.netsweng.com/
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