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?"

Comments

Re:Mike's diary entry

[oliverthered]

I aggree,
The kernel really need proper modularisation.
It annoys me that I have to patch the whole kernel to a given version and can't just patch up the modules I use.

I've sent some small critical patches for the 2.5 USB tree (that also apply to 2.4), which were reviewed, everyone said there ok, but then never applied.

The Kernel is also lacking in documentation, e.g. USB (which I'm nmost famillia with) is based on clear documented standards, a lot of the functionality and data structures are pulled directly from the standards, but I don't think you'll find a single referance to this in the USB source.

somthing like /*
* stucture description ......
* Taken from document xyz section 123
*/
struct stucture { ....
}; /*
*This is a function is does abc
*
*Refer to document xyz section 123
*/
function afunction(){
}

would be a good start.

Re:Mike's diary entry

[rifter]

I recognize that this works in Windows, and that it has worked indeed even with Windows 98 and 2000. I am reasonably certain I mentioned that it had been done both in Windows and Linux. What I am saying is that in both systems it is notoriously unreliable for the reasons given above. I am glad you found a combination that works for you. Could you share with the class what laptop this is?

I should also mention that the laptops always have better pm features for two reasons:

1) That is what pm was made for; you need to conserve battery life on laptops and if you make a laptop where pm does not work right you get screwed in support.

2) Usually you have more unified design w/r/t case/ps/mb which is never the case with white box desktops and not necessarily the case with oem desktops.

Nevertheless, I have certainly seen more than my share of notebook/OS combinations in which it does not work, and as anyone who has had a suspend corrupt their disk utterly will tell you, it really, really sucks. So again, if you have a combo that works, share with us, because it very often does not, and if it does not, you (the user/customer) have very littel control over what you can do, and no one manufacturer can necessarily help you (because agian this is a bios+mb+ps+os solution, evrryone having to be on the same page and not making crap, which is why standards like acpi are created in the first place.