Somewhat OT XFree86 question (maybe M. A. Harris will speak up)

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Alan Cox wrote:

>> 3-does anyone know if keith packard and the suse crew are still working
>> on xrender are there competing options out there
>
>Keith is working on cool stuff still yes. Whether XFree will pick it
>up I don't know but I hope so. Someone has already packaged some 
>versions of Keiths kdrive X server for x86 for low end systems, where it
>is a definite win.

This is more for everyone else, rather than it is a reply to
Alan...

Just for those that don't already know....

My XFree86 src.rpm has the option to build Keith's kdrive servers 
also, but it is disabled by default.  If the flag with_kdrive is 
set to 1 in the XFree86.spec and the package rebuilt, kdrive will 
be built into XFree86-kdrive package, and it includes all of the 
kdrive X servers.  These are mainly useful for low end systems 
and portable devices, PDAs, etc.

The main reasons that kdrive is disabled in my src.rpm at build 
time currently, is:

1) It is x86-only and lots of the servers aren't completely 
   portable without an unknown amount of work.

2) We don't have the manpower to support them, and I didn't want 
   to ship them and then be unable to provide the resources to 
   fix bugs that got reported, having to redirect people 
   upstream with their bug reports.  Also, I didn't want other 
   parts of the distribution using or relying on kdrive's 
   existance as I added it mainly for my own experimentation, and 
   if we grew any reliance on it, I'd have to split my existing 
   time even thinner than it is now, to support more drivers.

Now that Fedora Core is open to the community however, if there
is enough volunteer interest, I am not opposed to enabling kdrive
in my Fedora builds, as long as others are willing to contribute
to maintaining them as well. At least they're debuggable with 
stock gdb.  ;o)

Keith's kdrive is now maintained on freedesktop.org outside of 
the XFree86 master repository.  I'll be making rpm packages of 
all of Keith's stuff during Fedora Core 2 development, and 
possibly including it in the distribution, or in Fedora Extras 
or Alternatives, etc.

Hope this is useful info also..

TTYL

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat