XFree86 modularization

[Egbert Eich <eich@XFree86.Org>]

[ We should discuss this on forum, but it relates to one issue that
came up on the last conference call and I'm not sure it those who are 
interested are subscribed so I'm crossposting it to the confcall 
participants. I apologize that some of you receive this twice. ]

The issue of modularization of XFree86 so that individual parts can 
be released separately has been brought up by several people and
Branden Robinson has raised it on the last conference call. 

I have briefly thought about this issue:

Some work is currently under way to make this possible for drivers.
To make this possible for more parts we need to design a somewhat
bigger framework. I would like to invite Branden and others who are 
interested in this to happen to spend some time and design a 
'project plan'.
Although I think this is an importand matter I don't commit myself
to it as I know I won't have time to work on it, but maybe someone
else does. However this person should then be prepared to do the
actual work.

Here are some items that need to be addressed:

- We need to identify what should be shipped as a separate module:
  I don't really think that this will be much. The libs? How much
  do we change there? The apps? For example: do we really need to 
  ship xterm separately - does it change that much? The drivers are 
  the most importand thing right now in my opinion.
- We need to find out how to pack things. Once we found this out
  modularization is very simple with CVS.
  I expect that we need some base module which contains all files 
  that are shared between the modules. This would contain the 
  configuration and include files among others.
- We need to find out how to alter the build process to allow
  building of the separate modules.
- We need to design a release process: ideally this would be fairly
  automatic (ie we should have scripts for that). However we have to 
  document what needs to be done there:
  Starting from tagging the release, fixing the release notes, 
  building for all the different platforms, packing the binaries, 
  setting up a release channel. It can't be that everybody releases 
  his version on his homepage.
- We need to find a versioning mechanism to help support.
  Currently there is a versioning mechansim for drivers and 
  loadable modules at the moment, however nothing ensures that the 
  version numbers are bumped. We need the same thing for binaries 
  and libs. We need to find a way to query the version information 
  from all different modules (including the installed xkb files ;-) !).

Maybe one should start by looking at how the current release process
works.

Again, these were the issues that came to my mind however there may be
a lot more. Feel free to add.

Egbert.
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