[other xsf members, feel free to chime in if I'm forgetting something or saying something stupid :)]
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 14:41:24 +0200, Marc Brockschmidt wrote: > * Which major upstream releases of X.org are expected in the next two > years? Which of those are material for Debian stable, which might be a bit > flaky? > X.org release management is notoriously pretty bad. Releases often slip by months, and bugs in .0 server releases aren't unheard of. See also http://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2009-release_engineering/mgp00009.html Anyway, there's no schedule for 1.7 to my knowledge, let alone for the subsequent releases. I'd guess server 1.7 (and X.Org 7.5) will come before the end of the year, though, so that seems like a good candidate for a squeeze release in 2010. FWIW, the pattern so far looks like: Apr 19 2007 xorg-server-1.3.0.0.tar.gz Sep 6 2007 xorg-server-1.4.tar.gz Jun 10 2008 xorg-server-1.4.1.tar.gz Jun 11 2008 xorg-server-1.4.2.tar.gz Sep 3 2008 xorg-server-1.5.0.tar.gz Sep 23 2008 xorg-server-1.5.1.tar.gz Oct 10 2008 xorg-server-1.5.2.tar.gz Nov 5 2008 xorg-server-1.5.3.tar.gz Feb 25 12:19 xorg-server-1.6.0.tar.gz Apr 14 13:09 xorg-server-1.6.1.tar.gz Jul 7 16:39 xorg-server-1.6.2.tar.gz Jul 31 23:42 xorg-server-1.6.3.tar.gz > * How much time do you usually need from a new upstream release of X.org > to a stable Debian package in unstable? > I'd say 6 months to a year from a .0 server to something we can ship in stable. Depending if RedHat/Fedora are shipping it too and thus fixing most bugs for us. > * How many "big" transitions will the upcoming changes cause? When should > those > happen? Can we do something to make them easier? > Lately the big problems were related to the stability of the intel driver, which went through several big changes (full modesetting in the driver instead of using the bios, then switch of acceleration architecture to EXA, then a kernel memory manager, then kernel mode setting, and I'm probably forgetting some). Hopefully most of that is over, and we can migrate it to testing soon along with the rest of the X stack. Kernel mode setting for the radeon driver is being worked on, will be in staging in the 2.6.31 kernel, so hopefully we can ship that stack with squeeze. The nouveau driver is also lining up for inclusion in the kernel (maybe in staging in 2.6.32?) so it'd be really great to be able to ship that in the release, too. Some of that depends on having enough people available to package new releases, triage/forward bugs, and test the new stuff. I won't be able to do much of that myself in the foreseeable future. One thing that might cause some minor disruption in sid is the moving around of headers between libxext and x11proto-xext (http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xorg-announce/2009-August/000953.html). Fedora already went through that, though, and the change should be mostly invisible to clients. Cheers, Julien -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-release-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
