Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Dr. Diesel]

2008/5/12 Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com>:
>
>  It's the least buggy X server branch with the features we want.
>
>  I admit, it's not a release, and that's entirely process failure on my
>  part.  Having lots of masters to obey is not easy, and in this case my
>  time got chewed up by other business obligations.  Thanks RHEL, you're
>  awesome.  So the thing I chose to sacrifice was the (actually fairly
>  labor-intensive) process of badging the tarball as a release.  It still
>  got bug fixes.  It's ABI-stable.  Leaving it in was way less disruptive
>  than reverting back to 1.3 would have been.  It just isn't 1.5.0.
>
>  I actually went on a long rant about this at xdevconf:
>
>  http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/Events/XDC2008/Notes
>
>  The essential problem is that we're a victim of our own success.
>  There's lots of great stuff happening in X and unfortunately the thing
>  to suffer there is the stabilisation effort.  I do the best I can but
>  I'm not a superhero.  Nor, really, should I have to be.  And come to
>  that, I'm actually quite bad at the release management job.  I don't
>  communicate effectively, I don't delegate enough, and I don't deliver on
>  the schedules I promise.  Mea maxima freakin' culpa.
>
>  If someone else steps up to the job, huzzah.  Until then we're sort of
>  stuck.
>
>  My question to the gallery is how do I fix this?  How do _we_ fix this?
>  X needs more people.  It's way less scary than you've been led to
>  believe.  How do we get more people involved?  How do we step up the
>  testing effort?  How do we get to a culture of frequent releases and
>  incremental improvement?  Without these things, release management is
>  going to continue to be bursts of heroic effort that almost certainly
>  misses deadlines, as it has been ever since Xorg 6.7.
>
>  I mean, in some sense, it's fine.  It's software just like any other,
>  the number on the side of the box is merely a talisman, a dusting of
>  holy penguin pee.  But the release is also the primary artifact of the
>  development process.  Skipping that obligation is a disservice both to
>  ourselves and our consumers.
>
>  I hope we find an answer, but I just don't have one right now.
>
>  - ajax
>

I for one think your doing a great job and will happily wait till your
ready with 1.5!

Thanks for all your hard work.

Andy

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