Keith Packard's Xfree86 Fork Officially Started

Reivec writes "I was having a discussion with Keith Packard on IRC about the current developments in the XFree86 Saga and politics already discussed here earlier, and I learned many interesting things. The project has a new website, xwin, and things are getting underway. 'We're in the process of building community, from that we can construct a government. It's a hard process to construct a representative system from what we have now, so it will take a bit of time. Weeks, not months. --Keith'" Read on for some more details. Update: 04/13 03:30 GMT by T : Reader Khalid points to this informative interview with Packard at Linux Weekly News, too. " The site is has only been up a day or so and there isn't a lot on it right now, but he would like to see a lot of community involvement on the site and many user submitted stories to get conversation rolling. A french site has already taken notice and posted some information on xwin as well. Since such a fork could make a large impact on many *NIX users, I felt the need to ask, 'assuming you had an active fork under development, how interchangable would you expect it to be with Xfree (assuming release builds). Do you think distros would be quick to change if it offered improvements? Or could they provide both and have the user choose upon installation?' Keith replied, 'Given that distros will have input into how it gets built, I expect they'd be interested in a version closer to what they need. And, given that RH and Debian maintainers are both actively encouraging changes, it's hard to see how they wouldn't want to follow. (or lead).' So if you have had any interest at all in the XFree86 development, this is definitely a community site you should take advantage of."

Comments

xwin- Quartz

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that if they are going to fork they might as well do something right from the ground up. They could build something like Quartz Extreme and then add the old version of X11 on top of it like Apple has done with OS X. Lots of possibilities!

Re:Uh oh. . .

[dspeyer]

We're in the process of building community, from that we can construct a government.

Sounds kinda totalitarian to me. . .

Actually, it's strangely democratic. Seriously, the vast majority of successful Open Source projects have a single maintainer. X hasn't, and some might speculate that that's part of it's problem. I guess this has to be done to attract a large number of old X developers, but I really wonder if a benevolent dictator could make things work better (and if not, just use XFree86).

Re:So, what now?

[Soko]

X development has been somewhat slow, but it seems like the really big issue has always been drivers -- is there any way that new leadership can help get specs from manufacturers?

Getting drivers for X doesn't seem to be a problem, as long as those drivers are binary. I know, I know, Free Software, blah blah - however, if we're to turn these people to our side, we have to be sensitive to thier needs. In that vein, if xwin comes up with a clean, consistent API (perhaps even one that's linked into DRI or some other interface in kernel space) that all the video harware vendors can write to, without spelling out to thier competition how to trouce thier products in the next rev, they'll do much better I'm sure.

Editors: can we get Keith for a /. interview?

Please!

Soko

Deja Vu: History of GCC and the ECGS

[NZheretic]

The ECGS fork of the Gnu Compiler Collection ( GCC ) was formed in 1997, because many felt that developement of GCC was not going fast enough and that the then GCC developer were not accepting or adopting mnay freely contributed patches that radically changed the then stable GCC toolset.

From the GCC FAQ
In April 1999 the Free Software Foundation officially halted development on the gcc2 compiler and appointed the EGCS project as the official GCC maintainers. The net result was a single project which carries forward GCC development under the ultimate control of the GCC Steering Committee