The Future of XFree86 - like gcc v. egcs?

The Future of XFree86 - like gcc v. egcs?

Posted Mar 27, 2003 20:03 UTC (Thu) by hazelsct (subscriber, #3659)
In reply to: The Future of XFree86 - like gcc v. egcs? by tjasper
Parent article: The Future of XFree86

The analogy of gcc vs. egcs may be a good one, as far as assuaging fears of "duplicated effort". Egcs forked in order to bring a more bazaar-like development style to the project for bug fixes, optimization improvements, etc., but never strayed far from the original interface. As gcc continued its infrequent releases (like 2.8.1), egcs folded in the changes. Eventually, the gcc people saw the light, decided to adopt egcs as gcc, and everyone was happy.

But a major difference is that everything egcs did was in the open, here it seems one person worked behind the scenes to start a fork, and also made very large changes to CVS without consulting anybody. He hasn't replied (AFAIK) to the charges of dishonesty (which is apparently backed up by the email record).

The point of all this being, X forks are not necessarily bad, but at least to this outsider, Packard's way doesn't sound at all like the right way to do it.

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