XGL Development Opens Up

An anonymous reader writes "David Reveman has made the latest XGL source code available for download. This comes a few weeks after development of the project was criticized for being done 'behind closed doors'. There have been huge changes to XGL, the most significant being restructuring of the code, allowing XGL's GLX support to function on other drivers than the proprietary Nvidia one. Xcompmgr can currently be run under XGL with full acceleration provided that the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers are used. An OpenGL based compositing manager, 'Compiz' is currently in the works and a release is expected in February. David intends to get the code into freedesktop CVS as soon as possible, after which the code should eventually merge with Xorg."

Comments

huh?

[bcrowell]

Can anyone translate this into English? What is XGL and why should we care?

Re:Luminocity

[Anakron]

http://live.gnome.org/Luminocity
There. Fixed that link for you.

Not opened up

[Anonymous Coward]

To say the development of XGL opened up is to assume it was closed before, which is absolutely untrue.

Dave did major changes to XGL (as you can read in his post), and it's simply not possible to merge the code back while in the middle of a transition such as that. On top of that the X.org tree was pretty much frozen to allow the transition to modular X and the release of 7.0.

The "Novell closed XGL" conspiracy came from people with their own personal agenda against Novell (and Ximian).

Does it matter?

[Stalyn]

Does the source open during development matter? Look how much David Reveman got done by himself "behind closed doors". Really what matters is the source is available upon release to the public. Before that it doesn't really matter. The truth is the majority of the Xorg community doesn't believe in an OpenGL accelerated desktop. Look at the mailing list. The only people who do are a small group of coders who most likely do not have the time to actually achieve something worth using.

However if a company like Novell did pick up the project and paid developers to work on it full time but the source would be closed until release... well tough luck. In reality the only reason David released the code now was to get it into the Xorg tree. That way they can continue to "code-drop" to a tree that can be used by everyone, instead of kdrive which is for developers.

Also the Xorg developers seem to be concerned with Xegl which David isn't even working on. I dont care either way. Just get it done.