XFree86 Enters Wondrous World Of CVS

Quite a number of people have written with news from the USENIX annual technical conference. The news? The Xfree86 ^[?] folks have announced that XFree86 will now have CVS access.

Comments

Re:For aspirin?

[Sneakums]

For those who don't understand, CVS is the Concurrent Versioning System, a program for code change and change conflict management.

--
"Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

It's good to see X becomming more open

[richie123]

I think one of the most difficult things about X is that they rarely post any information on their web site, and their is no way to get an easy idea about the progress tht the X developers have made. I hope this begins to actract more developers, and improves the project a great deal.

CVS maintenance

[ahornby]

I use CVS daily and think its excellent. However there a number useful of patches with haven't made it into the main distribution literally for years.
e.g.

* alternate port number patch
* proxy tunneling patch
* LOCAL_BRANCH patch

Is anyone reading this involved in the development of CVS itself and able to comment on when these patches will make it in?

Re:CVS maintenance

[Khalid]

Open Avenue is now the official CVS maintainer ! they have recently bought Cyclic and promised to integrate many patchs floating around and develop CVS activly. They have even hired someone didacted entirely to this job.

Have a look at the new CVS home at www.cvshome.org

Re:CVS maintenance

[grammar nazi]

I agree with you David, but I will admit that Conor is right, too. I edit it on multiple computers. My advisor always wants to see the new changes to my thesis. CVS allows me to see what I changed since the last release and only give him the new stuff.

Although I haven't used it yet, I like the idea of going back to a previous version.

On a different note, I went to a Engineering Analysis workshop sponsored by HP, and I got the following idea: If you could design an easy to use Web interface for CVS (this alone wouldn't be too hard), then you could sell it to Engineering Dept. Managers and make millions. All the managers at this workshop a) didn't know anything about computers, b) have complicated multi-file engineering projects that their employees are working on (CAD files, Analysis files), and c) are willing to spend big $$$$$ on 'file management solutions'. The powers of CVS and a friendly interface would do the trick.

Haiku

[YASD]

Jump on board, hackers!
Oh, wait...read only...dammit
I clap with one hand

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Re:Great

[Dysan2k]

Sure.. but in 8-bit color, how do you decide what color palette to use? Are you going to remove colors for the Alpha-blending ability? Do you make anti-aliasing for only 15, 16, 24, and 32 bit palettes available? There are some concerns when it comes to that.

Now, I'd personally LOVE to see alpha-blending/anti-aliasing in X myself. But the X protocol could do with some changes itself (compression, ssX...) to improve the speed some. Granted it's fast, but I've seen a TON of posts on /. on how it could be made much better. Maybe now with CVS, I can duck my head in there and see how much of a fiasco it would be to implement such things. (

Of course, a setup program for X4.0 would REALLY be sweet at this point!h

Re:Great

[be-fan]

No it is an unmitigated disaster. The idea is that new features that can be server side, should be server side. It lowers memory usage (only one copy of anti-aliasing font libraries), it increases performance (especially over a network) and it lets apps automatically take advantage of the feature. BeOS is integrating a new true-type razterizer from Bitstream called FontFusion. Becauese all programs depend on the OS for font support, all programs will automatically take advantage of this feature. This is very important, if you want to retain a good user experience. Also, the fact that it is hard to add anti-aliased fonts is indicative of a larger problem in the system. I find it mind-boggling that the MIT guys decided to let if be extensible from a window manager point of view, but made the imaging model hard to extend. (Of course I doubt they thought people would still use the software in the year 2000!)

just one question...

[ywwg]

I don't want to start a download of the entire tree just to get a little bit of info... namely, have they fixed dga mouse support yet? This question gets asked day-in and day-out on the newsgroups by all of us l33t gamerz who need a smoother mouse to play quake under linux.

So, has it been fixed in CVS, or are you guys going to make me download it to find out? :P

Already doing it...

[otis wildflower]

... check the DRI distro, which contains the entire xf4.0 xc/ source tree IIRC.. I've been running latest builds out of that tree on my 2.4.0test1-ac22 built box using my G400M/32 and Quake3.. I get about 5-30 minutes of stable use in 'failsafe' ?dm mode..

Root around in the site, you'll find CVS instructions...

Your Working Boy,

Re:Thanks SourceForge

[DeadSea]

If you have an open source project written in java, you can get free cvs space at the Giant Java Tree.

In addition to cvs access the gjt will compile your program, create zip files of your program that can be downloaded. There is a Web based interface to the CVS (a servlet) which you can download and set up elsewhere if you wish.

There is also a CVS client written in java that I highly recommend for anybody that likes a bit of a GUI for using CVS. It works well under both windows and linux.

The whole thing is run by Tim Enders, and is simply amazing.

Xfree open process.

[len(*jameson);]

This is an important step for the Xfree project, however other critical events really need to occur to help this worthy project become more open. For example, what is their policy going to be on CVS commit access? The easiest way to seperate the OSS projects is on the openness of their CVS commit access granting policies.

Just simple anonymous CVS access isn't going to make that huge a difference in the openness of the project.

This makes my project easier

[felis_panthera]

I'm in the midst of coding a module for the Olympus Project from Mount Linux that will handle CVS administration. This project is meant to bring all administration for an entire *nix network to a single X desktop and this new development should make it easier. If anyone is interested in helping out on the mod_CVS that I am working on, it is located on Sourceforge under the name Cerberus. Good news all around I guess.

XFree86 opens mailing lists too

[keithp]

Along with CVS access, XFree86 has created new public mailing lists for development and support. Existing private lists will remain for NDA'd topics, but there aren't many of those anymore.