[ On Tuesday, August 13, 2002 at 16:53:44 (-0400), Brian A. Seklecki wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Rehash: XFree86 Compiled on NetBSD/Sparc
>
> ... perhaps I'm making an illogical assumption here.  My concern is that XFree86
> is under active development in the standard open-source method (mailing
> lists, CVS access, etc.) whereas X.org's release is at an almost stand-still.

Hmmm.... yeah, well, the two groups sort of address entirely different
concerns at rather different levels.

I should hope that X.Org's work is not frequently changing.  X11R6.6
seems nice and stable as far as I can see.  The upper layers of the
Xserver should be very stable and unchanging by now.

Xfree86, on the other hand, should be focused primarily on the lower
layers, what would normally be framebuffer drivers in the kernel, and
perhaps better APIs for handling graphics accelleration control of ever
newer and fancier graphics chips through the driver kernel interfaces.

Note that R6.6 does already contain much of the Xfree86 code fixes and
features, at least up to the point when it was released.  I don't know
how much more of what Xfree86 has had done to it since is generically
applicable to the common X.Org code-base.  From notes I see on the
Xfree86.org web pages it seems there is still active work going on in
X.Org and that in fact Xfree86 will be a major contributor to a new and
standardized X11 API extension (Xinerama).

Note also that The Xfree86 Project, Inc. is an honorary member of X.Org,
and in that sense Xfree86 is a productized version of the code provided
by X.Org.

> I can't speak from an architecture engineering standpoint, but it seems
> logical that coordinating development w/ XFree would be more constructive.
> In the 3 weeks since I subscribed to Xfree mailing lists, I've seen at least
> a dozen imports/sync's (1) from Free/Net/OpenBSD cvs trees:

Well, if they're pulling code and fixes from us, it seems the right
thing to do is to continue to engineer well designed native Xservers for
the various NetBSD ports based on the X.Org code base, particularly for
the non-i386 ones, and to co-ordinate as best as possible with feeding
Xfree86 and X.org both any generic fixes.  Then NetBSD (/sparc in
particular) users can have the choice of using native NetBSD X11, or of
using a separately provided Xfree86 distribution.  If the Xfree86 folks
want to try to keep their code portable to non-i386 NetBSD ports then
all the power to them!  ;-)

What would be nice would be to finally see the full official X11R6.6
release merged into NetBSD xsrc.  There was some discussion of this in
the past, IIRC.

It would also be nice to be able to pull generic fixes from Xfree86 (and
wherever else "open source" X11 development happens) into NetBSD's xsrc,
though doing that well would be a considerable maintenance effort.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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