Hi Alan

On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 2:38 AM Alan Coopersmith
<[email protected]> wrote:
> […]
>
> A proposed way forward was to make a new branch called "main" from a
> starting point around Feb. 2024, and to only cherry-pick over from master
> the commits which weren't later reverted and which we generally agreed we'd
> want to keep.

I think that's a good idea, kill two birds with one stone!

> After doing a bunch of reverts, and then seeing an MR to revert another 40
> commits to unbreak the libvnc.so loadable module, I finally sat down to see
> what this would look like.
>
> My proposed branch is at:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/alanc/xserver/-/tree/main?ref_type=heads
> (note that I plan to rewrite/overwrite this branch as necessary while it's
>   just in my personal repo and not yet in the main xserver repo)
>
> Diffs of the git shortlog between it and the current master branch are at:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/alanc/xserver/-/snippets/7877
>
> Diffs of the full git log between it and the current master branch are at:
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/alanc/xserver/-/snippets/7878
>
> This main branch has 835 commits since the start point, where the master
> branch had 1386 (and that's not counting the 40 reverts from !2102).
>
> I've eliminated commits that met one or more of these:
>   - were later reverted, or were the reverts of a commit that was dropped
>   - fixed or depended on commits that were dropped
>   - didn't follow the license requirements to include copyright & permission
>     notices
>   - caused a lot of churn for little benefit (like mass replacing the
>     PANORAMIX ifdefs with XINERAMA or mass removing HAVE_DIX_CONFIG_H ifdefs)
>   - broke ABI/API that we know others used
>   - broke long-standing Xserver abstractions/patterns, like function
>     vector wrapping/dispatching
>
> I did leave some of the "unexport API" commits that I thought might be safe.
>
> I did not merge fix commits into the commits they fix, so there may still
> be some points in the git history that are unbuildable and not good for
> git bisects, but there should be fewer than before since the commits we
> outright reverted are gone now.

Whot maintains a set of git tools that might be useful for that:

https://github.com/whot/git-branch-tools?tab=readme-ov-file#testing-commits-in-sequence

> I've not done any testing on this yet besides building and seeing the CI
> pipelines all passed, since I'd first like to hear others thoughts on if
> this is the right direction and the right subset of commits.
>
> Do we want to make a new main branch and make all future release branches
> from it, abandoning the current master branch?  (I hope we can get 26.1
> branches of both Xwayland and the other Xservers made this year, after our
> 25.1 plans for both got scuttled last year by this mess.)

What would be your timeline for that?

I was planning to start preparing xwayland-26.1 soon enough, as (as
you said), I gave up on making xwayland-25.1 last year unfortunately,
so it's a long overdue.

Do you plan to coordinate the release of a server-26.1-branch yourself?

> If so, is this the right set of commits to include & exclude?  Now is the
> time to rewrite history on this branch before it becomes official and
> people start relying on it, if there's more changes we should drop, or
> changes I dropped that people think should stay.
>

Thanks for doing that!

Olivier

Reply via email to