Xorg 1.5 missed the train?

[Les Mikesell]

Suren Karapetyan wrote:
> 
>> I assume that was an attempt at humor....  But, it makes it hard to 
>> claim that you didn't have some inside information about when the 
>> interface was going to stop changing.  In another company that sort of 
>> thing might be called anti-competitive behavior.
>>
> 
> Guys let's stop using the argument "they didn't know it was stable"...
> If You're writing a driver for Your product and not just an ordinary 
> userspace thing, but a driver half of which sits in the kernel and the 
> other half in X, You'll HAVE TO have a guy (or maybe many more) who will 
> be doing just that and nothing else.

Yes...  But this may not be the guy that decides when an officially 
supported driver is announced and released.

> And I bet if someone's job is writing an Xorg driver, he would at least 
> be signed to the -devel mailing list and would checkout from 
> CVS/SVN/GIT/... at least once a week to watch where the development is.

Yes, so if someone mentioned that it was maybe, probably stable a week 
ago without being prepared to call it a release, you might expect said 
programmer to have noticed by now, but it hardly seems fair to expect 
him or his company to commit to a release at that point either.

> And don't tell that's not the case with Windows. Of course it isn't... 
> But we aren't talking about a windows programmer who is writing Xorg 
> driver as a hobby in the first time in his life and doesn't know that 
> ABI's aren't very loved in FOSS world. We are speaking about a *nix 
> programmer.

*nix doesn't have much to do with refusing to standardize interfaces, 
that's exclusively Linus's territory.  I think we'll see something 
different when Red Hat does their release.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com