ad: x.org

From: steef (steefvanduin_at_zonnet.nl)
Date: 04/09/05

  • Next message: Miquel van Smoorenburg: "Re: NIS And /home Dirs On Client Systems" 
    Date: Sat, 09 Apr 2005 10:50:51 +0200
To: debian@murphy.debian.org:gebruikerslijst <debian-user@lists.debian.org>

    seems to be some uncertainties in an recent discussion about the choice
    between x.org (X11 etc.) and xfree86 on this list.

    this maight be illuminating.

    steef

    text:

    source:

    http://necrotic.deadbeast.net/xsf/XFree86/trunk/debian/local/FAQ.xhtml

    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 commitment to the users 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). XTerm is
    independently maintained by Thomas Dickey, and the xprint.org version of
    Xprt is already separately packaged in Debian.

    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 (March 2005), packaging of the X.Org X11 distribution
    is underway in the X Strike Force's xorg-x11 Subversion repository.

    kr.,

    groet'n

    steef

    proud_debian_user 

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