Slashdot Mirror
X.Org Releases First Modular Source Roll-Up
NewsForge is reporting that X.Org has released their first modular roll-up release. From the article: "All X11R7.0 derivative ("modularized") releases divide the source code into logically distinct modules, separately developed, built, and maintained by the community of X.Org developers. This concentrates and accelerates development time, supporting continuous modification, testing, and publication of each module.The new modular format offers focused development, and rapid and independent updates and distribution of tested modular components as they are ready, freed from the biennial maintenance release timetable."
A monolithic system with poor or unstable interfaces is a maintenance nightmare. Maybe this explains why in the end XFree86 was so slow in supporting new hardware drivers. I still remember having had to patch the sources manually for my ATI Radeon 9600XT card, just because the PCI ID of that card was still not in the release quite some time after the card was on the market. Really bad.
With a modular built, they can now change one part, like the drivers, with little fear of introducing problems in other parts. High time this happened. I am looking forward to the things to come.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
X.org has been modular for a while -- X11R7.0 was already modular in December 2005. The real news here is that X.org released X11R7.1, not that they've gone modular.
One thing I'd like to see is an ordered list of dependencies. I still do manual builds on one system, to stay in practice. Building X11R7.0 was so painful, I stuck with X11R6.9. When using a distro that does the heavy lifting, X11R7.0 is great, but sorting out the dependencies in dozens of modules is a PITA if you're trying to build it manually. I bet the distro maintainers are cursing the X.org people.
So they broke it up into pieces and a we are now celebrating the
release of the pieces rollde together into a monolithic whole!?
That would be really cool. In the meantime though I would like to suggest a system where most common large "packages" of software were compiled and posted some place on the net that Gentoo users could download them. That way everytime there was a point release they wouldn't have to spend ages recompiling. Sure there may be a slight hit to performance but given the inherrent redundancy of compiling the same packages thousands of times on every users computers to just a few times for major architecture it makes sense to me. /runs for cover.
Accelerated indirect GLX has been a until recently been a unattainable holy grain for a long time now in regards to X.
What this will allow you to do would be allow users to gain some benifits from having hardware acceleration for 3d and multimedia application even when running applications remotely over a network.
Another way to put it is that applications gain their acceleration not from the hardware directly, but from the Xserver they are running on, which then itself then uses the hardware acceleration.
It's not going to be as fast or efficient as direct rendering, but it's much more flexible and usefull in a wider context.
It is another stepping stone to having a fully realised opengl-based X server.
This is probably very much due to Redhat's AIGLX specificly and xgl development in general.
(J) <--- The joke
...
( )
__|__ <--- You
|
/ \
Go play the game Katamari Damacy. Then imagine that each random thing you add to your proto-star is one little piece of the Xorg whole. You can imagine that the server is a cow if you like.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Not having to download the entire source tarball to fix one package lowers the cost of entry for people interested in making changes.
Or more likely, being able to build a distribution without twm, xedit, xeyes, xman, xvfb, and the billions of other useless utilities that clog up and XWin installation could make for smaller, more focused builds that assist projects that are focused only on producing an end product. (Damn Small Linux is a good candidate in my mind.)
Previously, the X build system was so monolithic in nature that you couldn't not build all these stupid little widgets. Now that things are more modularized, you can build only what you need and throw away the rest.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
X seems to work OK for me, and doesn't seem substantially less functional than the Windows or Mac OS models.