X.org plans to replace monolithic with modular tree in longer term

X.org plans to replace monolithic with modular tree in longer term

Posted Apr 7, 2004 20:11 UTC (Wed) by stevenj (subscriber, #421)
Parent article: X.Org Foundation releases X Window System X11R6.7

If I remember the discussions on the X.org mailing list correctly, this monolithic release is essentially only a stopgap measure—in the short term, they wanted to release something as close as possible to XFree86, as quickly as possible, to ensure that people have a stable platform to migrate to.

In the longer term, they are planning to split X up into a series of smaller packages for the server, different libraries, utility applications, etcetera. The distros want such a modular release very badly so that different parts of X can be updated independently. Apparently, many of these components are rapidly reaching maturity—they are not rewrites, after all, just a split of the existing code into pieces with a more modern build architecture (autotools vs. imake).

In the even longer term, Keith Packard's freedesktop.org X server, a substantially rewritten server compared to X11R6.7's, may replace the X server component, but that's apparently still pretty experimental.

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