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XFree86 Politics
Pivot writes "Keith Packard wants to fork the XFree86 effort. 'It has been brought to the attention of the XFree86 Core Team that one of its members, Keith Packard, has been actively (but privately) seeking out support for a fork of XFree86 that would be led by himself. He is also in the process of forming a by-invitation-only group of vested interests to discuss privately concerns he has about XFree86 and the future of X. He has consistently refused to even disclose these concerns within the context of the XFree86 Core Team, which makes his membership of that team unviable. As a consequence, Keith Packard is no longer a member of the XFree86 Core Team.' The XFree86 team is trying to become more open, to combat the fork. Keith is a capable developer, having worked on FontConfig, Xft, the X render extension etc. Meanwhile, All is not good in how XFree86 drivers are being developed. Anyone remember the GGI initiative a few years back, and the uproar it caused?"
Maybe he is holding it back. I say fork!
Actually to be honest, I would like the transparency server but more importantly things like the Mach64 driver need to be integrated so I can get XVideo and DRI w/o having to download binaries. The stuff in question has not been updated in ages and I am concerned that the 4.3 release will go unnoticed and I'll be stuck w/o dri.
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The requested URL
Apache/1.3.26 Server at www.xfree86.org Port 80
He better find a new home for his homepage methinks!
Trolling is a art,
The diary entry is Jan 9th, so presumably xfree86 opened up the developer link since then. One wonders of they opened it in response to undercurrents or complaints in the ranks?
The message posted by "Moulinneuf" actually suggests to me that Keith probably is well-justified in doing this. It makes sense to kick people off an open source project if they don't contribute or do technically the wrong thing, but that's clearly not the case with Keith. OTOH, if a project member wants to test the waters for a fork privately, so what? Moulinneuf's message sounds like Keith was part of the secret service and spying for the enemy. Sounds like wounded pride and politics to me.
Another question one might want to ask, though, is whether it isn't worth starting an X11 server from scratch. X11 isn't as complicated as the XFree86 server makes it appear to be. And the priorities have shifted, too: stuff that used to be really important in X11 could perhaps now be shifted to simple generic implementations.
But from the user's point of view, the problems are quite similar. For example, you still can't get a 2.4 Linux kernel with decent ACPI support, reasonably complete FireWire support, or lots of other features that have been out individually for months or years. And the 2.5 kernels do not even come close to compiling cleanly in most configurations (at least the half dozen I have tried).
Both the Linux kernel and XFree86 suffer from similar problems: they are very well-written and well-tuned C programs, but there is only so much magic even the best C wizard using the best tools can work on huge C source trees.
Actually Keith has been working on this for some time. Take a look at the hw/kdrive tree in XFree86, that produces very small Xservers and supports a few chips so far (notably things like the iPaq use it).
Also a lot of the rest of the XFree binary package set is fonts, weird prehistoric applications (wtf uses xsetpointer, xkbbell,
xstdcmap...) and ancient unused (but important for back compatibility libraries) like Xaw.
Firewire is ok - the ACPI one is a good point, and its one reason I want to get the newer ACPI and the patches to handle buggy but not detected by MS ACPI into the -ac tree.
Same as now. X extensions are negotitated and its done with compatibility covered. Shared memory is an extension, Video overlay is an extension , Xrender is an extension ...
Its just X is so good at this people don't notice 8)
Ok, I've participated in many X "discussions" and the one feature of X that is always trumpeted is the out of the box network transparency.
As the Windows and Mac OS GUIs increase in sophistication, we have seen that they have been able to add in "network transparency" to an extent (ok more like "remote viewing") with things like VNC, and other implementations, that exist entirely seperate from the GUI proper - they basically implement a very very basic bitmap-copying protocol.
Is there a case where THIS IS NOT SUFFICIENT? Is it really that much of a win to burden the entire architecture with a feature that in its common use can be implemented completely seperately and still solve 90% of the problem?
I'm serious here, can some a heavy/long-time user of X illustrate cases where they NEED network transparency built in (besides that it is "elegant" technically)? The only thing I can think of is having remote windows "integrate" with your local X server - but is this a COMMON CASE at all? I would imagine the common case to be temporarily using remote apps (potentially on an entirely seperate desktop instance) in which case it doesn't matter (or is in fact beneficial) that they are visually distinct, OR using an ENTIRE remote desktop (KDE, Gnome, etc.) in which case ALL your apps will be "integrated" visually since they will all be running on the remote machine.
In what circumstances would you WANT disparate remote applications, from potentially multiple remote machines, integrating invisibly in your current desktop ?(I for one would think this would be hell of a confusing! "Shit did I just 'rm' that file on my local machine, or the server!??") What is the benefit here? What is the cost?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
About three years ago I was a happy user of XFree86 3.3.6; then XFree86 4.0 was released and my Matrox Mystique stopped working. After carefully determining that the cause was almost certainly a bug in the XFree86 4.0 driver, I decided to send a bug report to XFree86. I read all the relevant instructions on the web site, collected the required data, and sent a polite and detailed bug report to the appropriate mailing lists.
After some weeks I had received no answer. Bad luck, I thought, so I rechecked I had done everything as indicated in the XFree86 site and reposted my bug report. Zero feedback again. I sent about eight bug reports along three months more or less, and got no answer from any XFree86 developer.
I did get mails from some people with the same problem as me, wanting to know if I had found the solution. I had tried to debug the driver myself, but I don't really had the necessary skills and experience, not to talk about the technical specifications. So there was nothing users who suffered this problem could do; we had to stay with 3.3.6.
Finally, I got some explanation from the last bug report I sent. It was from another user who was frustrated with the way XFree86 was developed. He explained that the public mailing lists I had sent my bug reports to (as I was supposed to do) were only occasionaly browsed by a couple XFree86 developers. Real communication among developers happened in private, closed mailing lists that only people with CVS access could post to or even read.
So the problem went unfixed. Some months later I upgraded my computer and forgot about this. Probably, to this day, owners of Matrox Mystiques with a certain chipset can't use XFree86 4.0.x, and I bet the maintainers of the mga driver don't even know. I couldn't tell them.
I find it very funny that you ask:
:)
if everyone started forking the kernel, glibc, gcc, and XFree among other core packages, where would that leave us?
When this exact thing happened with GCC some time ago. Did you know that GCC 3.0 is based off a fork of GCC 2.7.2 (IIRC) which for a while was known as EGCS? But, as EGCS progressed, it quickly surpassed GCC and, eventually, was adopted as the new GCC 3.0. So, had this fork not occured, GCC wouldn't be where it is today. I'm assuming that answers your question.
Someone asked "even X protocol can be changed ;)?". David (the XFree86 Head) replied "If such a change turns out to be good, then yes".
More, the core team showed itself to be flexible and proved it can be convinced -- they were against bugzilla (which has been set up recently) etc. There is will...
I saw this link on OSNews and thought it should be reposted here. This is a member of the XFree BOD giving more information on why Keith was expelled and a discussion of how X is governed (i.e. the distinction between BOD and Core). He also argues for LSB taking a much larger role with respect to X (I can't help but think that BSD, Solaris, etc.. would object to that).
OTOH YMMV as far as this attack since there is no discussion of what specifically are the issues leading to the fork and rather vague comments about "corporate interests".