> From lfs-dev-boun...@linuxfromscratch.org Sun Mar 10 15:57:40 2013 > Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2013 16:50:53 +0100 > From: "Armin K." <kre...@email.com> > To: LFS Developers Mailinglist <lfs-dev@linuxfromscratch.org> > Subject: [lfs-dev] A note on Xorg Updates > > Hi there, > > If you remember, we agreed not to upgrade Xorg components very often > some time ago. > > You can notice, however, that I sometimes bump a library, driver, server > and such for a newer version. > > The reason behind that is mainly that even upstream developers "agree" > that katamari releases are waste of time. So my thoughts are we > shouldn't wait for any major stuff to happen (like we did wait for Xorg > Server 1.13.0 because we didn't want to upgrade libraries and protocol > headers just because we agreed on that) and just upgrade things as they > get released - as other rolling release distros do. > > If you are interested, here is the link to upstream post > > http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2013-February/055493.html > > Probably the most important part is: > > In keeping with the X.Org goal of about one release per > year, Release 7.7 of the X Window System occurred 6 June > 2012. Release 7.6 was about 1.5 years earlier, in > December 2010. However, there is some feeling among the > developer community that the "katamari" point releases > of all of X are no longer terribly useful, yet are a big > consumer of developer resources. Thus, it is likely that > these releases will be farther apart in the future, or > will cease altogether--not because development pace is > decreasing, but because point releases of individual > components are a better mechanism in the "new" world of > modularized X development. >
Well, you say '"agree"', whereas the doc uses the less-strong 'there is some feeling among the developer community'. If they go down that route then are they relinquishing the responsibility for ensuring that a particular versioned set of components - e.g. a point-release - works well together (it reminds me of the fairly-recent 'tarballs are an obsolete concept' a year or so back): and instead are punting the 'problem' out into the world such that in practice distros will do that work. If so, then I'd expect contributors (of money and resources generally) - and funding is discussed at some length in the doc you linked to - to maybe take cogniscance of that and adjust accordingly: they'd essentially now be paying X.Org &c for components, but no longer paying X.Org &c for verified interoperability of the set of components. Quite a lot of folks will not get involved closely in 'rolling release' projects. At some point, folks, a bit of coherence is appropriate: but I guess that release-engineering is deemed less attractive than "let's compile!" in some quarters. (Just my opinion - (although it happens to be correct in this case ;P ).) Adios, akh -- -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
