Hi all, just catching up :)

On Mon 07 Jul, Peter Burwood wrote:
> Does anyone know what is happening with the new console code. I filled

Well, which new console code :) At about August last year, Nut stopped working
on any of his own code. Since then, Rob has been producing some new code,
which should be pretty amazing as most of the 10 months working on it have
been crafting an impressive object-oriented, abstracted, multi-platform
environment. So, I'd expect this quite soon!

> in a survey about 6-8 weeks ago which had more than 10 questions related
> to the new console code, but no new console code has surfaced yet. ISTR

I should hope that we will be seeing the results of the survey RSN.

> that the current console code is part of the reason that the keyboard
> locks up and X crashes sometimes. It feels like it has been over a year

A lot of the problem is also with bugs related to things like setjmp() etc,
which the current X releases have a bugged version of (I believe you helped
point this out!) As the console itself only provides a bitmap (and part
of the crashes are due to the X server writing outside of this bitmap) then
it can't be blamed for a lot of the SEGVs that result, however things like
keyboard lockupos and problems switching VTs are clearly it's fault.

> Also, when are we going to either see a source code release of X, or a
> new release of X ? The last release of that is Oct 28 1996!!!

I would hope fairly soon. There is also the thought of moving NetBSD/arm32
over to XFree86 at some stage, as this is well supported in NetBSD and
is the X environment used by things like the Digital NC, though this
hasn't been fully sorted yet.

In any case, hopefully you may all see an unsupported release of the X
source code fairly soon; however I understand that Rob doesn't have time
to field people's queries on it, so Mark may end up answering most of
them, and some may be left unanswered. Time pressure, you see :) We
have always planned to release the X source code freely, as creating a
free distribution was the original goal of the RiscBSD project.

People are also probably wondering where the promised source merge
has got too, I'm trying to get this moving now.

	Neil

-- 
Neil A. Carson
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