On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 12:10:10AM +, ROBERTOJIMENOCA wrote:
> I saw this post on slashdot.org:
> http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=121015&cid=10187780
> This isn't funny.
>
> Do you have any roadmap to have x.org Debian packages?
> How may I help?
You may be interested in the latest addition to the Debian X FAQ.
What are Debian's plans with respect to X.Org and XFree86?
Thanks to Fabio Massimo Di Nitto for contributing much of this entry.
Because the XFree86 relicensing came at a time when Debian was trying to
stabilize its XFree86 packages for the sarge release, there was some
question among Debian's X Window System package maintenance team (the "X
Strike Force") — and much speculation among Debian's users — as to what
direction Debian would take.
There was never a serious proposal to attempt to ship anything other than
XFree86 4.3.0 in sarge, so work on that continued while discussion on the
debian-x mailing list took place. The following represents the consensus
reached by the X Strike Force, without objection from the mailing list
subscribers (among whom number many interested Debian developers and
users).
In June 2004, Fabio Massimo Di Nitto, the XFree86 package release manager
for Debian sarge and sid, started a thread to discuss the future of X
Window System packages in Debian for an open discussion between users and
the Debian package maintainers.
The discussion spanned nearly one hundred messages from over a dozen
participants, practically all of it constructive and very useful to the
Debian maintenance team. The outcome of the thread was farly clear to
everyone: Debian will move away from the XFree86 tree as soon as possible
after the upcoming stable release due to its license issues (see above).
The XFree86 package maintainers are committed to providing support and
assistance to the Debian Security Team for the XFree86 4.3.0-based
packages than Debian will ship in sarge. That is, our abandonment of the
XFree86 Project, Inc., as an upstream source of code does not mean that
we will abandon our committment to the user of our production release.
Futhermore, there was near-consensus that Debian should switch to the
X.Org source tree, with the goal of migrating to the modularized tree
over time. We expect that the monolithic X.Org distribution will be
modularized in a piecewise fashion; as that happens, we will "switch off"
the building of packages from the X.Org monolithic tree in favor of the
modularized components that become available from freedesktop.org.
While moving from XFree86's monolithic tree to X.Org's is a relatively
simple technical transition of itself, the transition to a
fully-modularized set of packages will take longer — indeed, an unknown
amount of time which depends on the speed of upstream's progress — but we
expect the process will bring the packages' quality to a higher level,
thanks to the introduction of a fast release cycle for each single
component. We expect to "modularize" two parts of the X.Org distribution
immediately: XTerm and Xprt (the XPRINT server). Both of these are
independently maintained by entities external to (but working in
cooperation with) freedesktop.org.
With these changes, it will also be easier for the Debian user community
to have a broader choice in X servers. At present, the Debian XFree86
package maintainers intend to support only the XOrg X server (which is
based on XFree86's). The X Strike Force does not plan to discourage other
people from packaging others. Debian developers that file
intent-to-package notices (ITPs) for other X servers are asked to
strictly cooperate with the X Strike Force to maintain similar packaging
standards, simplify the bug handling on shared components (like X
libraries) and discuss future changes and improvements.
As of this writing (October 2004), packaging of the X.Org distribution is
underway in the X Strike Force's xorg Subversion repository (ViewCVS).
--
G. Branden Robinson| Notions like Marxism and
Debian GNU/Linux | Freudianism belong to the history
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | of organized religion.
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Noam Chomsky
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