Letters to the editor

XFree86 needs a Fork

 
 
Hi,
 
I don't know anything about the development of XF86. But after reading just
a little bit of material I can realize that that is what is required. I am
surprised that nobody did it for so long. Kudos to Keith Packard for taking
the plunge, I hope he succeeds in revitalizing X, under whatever name he
brings it out.
 
I think you don't need any more reasons for a fork than Mike Harris's diary,
http://www.advogato.org/person/mharris/diary.html?start=5
 
In the Open Source World a project is only successful if it can attract a
large no. of developers. The larger the pool of developers the larger the
project. It doesn't matter how many users you have, because they do not
contribute. If they did they would be developers. Xfree86 has a meagre 250
developers, and only 14 are allowed to make a change after reviewing.
This is pathetically low for a project of XF86 size. This can only mean two
things, you don't even need to know anything else for this conclusion.
 
1) Current Development model of XF86 sucks and it sucks really really hard.
2) Current Developers aren't accepting outside help. They either think they
are the best and nobody can do a better job than themselves, or they think
that allowing other people in will reduce their importance. The first shows
a psychological problem the other is a measure of incompetence.
 
If 2) wasn't true 1) would have been solved. So there is a distinct necessity
of creating a fork.
 
The best thing about Open Source Projects is that if the current developers
are not doing justice to a project then you have the option to fork.
 
I hope Keith will be able to pool in a large no. of developers and hopefully
they will be able to move ahead of current XF86 within a short time.
 
I also desperately need a properly working driver for my i830M chipset, which
is not working even after almost 2 years of updates.
 
thanks,
-anandsr
 

Comments (3 posted)

Alternatives to Red Hat Update

Hi,
 
With the recent changes to red hat's update and support policy it may be
useful to draw readers attention to alternative methods of auto applying
updates to red hat systems.
 
Many people will already be familiar with Ximian's Red Carpet tool.
However, whilst this is free to use as a client, to publish software via
this mechanism one needs an agreement with Ximian.
 
One alternative which hasn't recieved as much attention is apt for rpm,
which I obtained from http://freshrpms.net/apt/ . This provides debian
style auto updates for red hat users. In addition to the command line
there is a gtk 2 GUI for apt called Synaptic available on the same site
which provides an alternative to red-carpet or the up2date tool.
 
The main advantages of apt for rpm I have found are:
 
* Free as in beer _and_ free of hassle. No registrations required.
 
* Open backend - anyone can put up an apt repository. This has two main
benefits:
 
* I've successfully done kernel upgrades using apt - something
red-carpet seems to baulk at.
 
* Software developers can set up their own apt site. For an example of
this in action see: http://gstreamer.net/releases/redhat/ . This is not
the case for people wishing to distribute by Red Hat up2date or Ximian
red-carpet.
 
* Not dependant on the fate of any one commercial entity. (e.g. what
happens to the red-carpet backend if Ximian goes under or has a change
of corporate policy)
 
The only disadvantage I can see is that apt4rpm and synaptic are not
installed by default by Red Hat (a problem they share with red-carpet).
 
Regards,
Alex Hornby.
 
PS Whilst on the subject of updates, I've found that rpm 4.1.1 from
ftp://ftp.rpm.org/pub/rpm/test-4.1.1 seems to cure the "rpm locks up"
problem I and others have been having with RedHat 8.0
 
--
Alex Hornby | See http://www.hornby.org.uk/

Comments (5 posted)

Why aren't we calling SCO names?

  As a mild side note on the SCO lawsuit, I'm surprised that nobody seems to
have started calling SCO funny names the way folks do MicroShaft... My
girlfriend is a principle software engineer who has been in the business for
over 20 years. One of her first jobs involved doing development on SCO boxes,
and she said they were commonly reffered to back then as "Spoiled Child
Operations" - In light of the current events, the name seems due for a
revival...
 
  ART

Comments (2 posted)

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