I have been watching this for over a year now. I helped port some XFree86
libraries to the GNU Built Tools framework for freedesktop Xlibs project
(and I have a freedesktop commit access). I created a XFree86 package for
my Linux systems for pkgsrc and I helped with the XFree86-* packages for
pkgsrc. And I created and use many xlibs packages (most in pkgsrc-wip).

The things I have noticed that make me consider Xorg:

- security and bug fixes that I found in Xorg CVS but not in XFree86 CVS.

- improvements for fontconfig, Xft and other code in Xorg but not in
XFree86.

- Some of our fixes in NetBSD's xsrc came from Xorg because XFree86 didn't
have yet.

Some of these are things that I directly don't care about -- but I am
glad there has been someone who work on these things in Xorg.

- various X11 developers work on Xorg for a variety of different
platforms and many are non-Linux users.

- just past couple days has been discussion on adding wsfb (dumb
framebuffer driver using wscons) driver for OpenBSD and NetBSD which is
being added.

I believe they would be open to allowing code that only NetBSD uses to be
added. I read that XFree86 only will accept OS independent code, but Xorg
will in some cases accept OS dependent code.

Where do we have a list of NetBSD specific code? Would I have to do a diff
against XFree86 and NetBSD's xsrc to find? Or is there an easier way?

- the Xorg community is friendly and appear to be open to suggestions.

- Xorg tries to have frequent, but not to frequent, releases.

- They have nice automated builds using Tinderbox (for example for Xorg
release, I had one of my NetBSD boxes setup to retrieve and test their
release builds daily for a few weeks and all results were posted
automatically to their tinderbox webpages).

- Another good thing is that they are working on having splitting up all
the "monolithic" code into smaller pieces and working on making it more
portable for building. The X libraries is basically done. If I understand
correctly, soon the monolithic X which is made of a few tar balls will be
replaced by many separately building projects.

The good and bad thing is that they are using the GNU Build tools
(autoconf, automake, libtool, etc.). I read that they plan to keep the
Imake bits in place, but I don't know how long they will be supported.

 Jeremy C. Reed

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