[ubuntu-x] State of X at Alpha-2

[Bryce Harrington]

Hi all,

The Alpha-2 freeze has been announced, so now is probably a good time to
evaluate where we are and what's ahead.

In terms of merges we're looking in good shape at the moment:

  http://www2.bryceharrington.org:8080/X/PkgList/versions_current.html

The bulk of little package syncs/merges are done and nearly all the
drivers are merged to latest versions.  Most of the remaining pieces
should be straightforward.

The xserver pre-releases will start arriving.  Sarvatt has already been
working on the packaging of a git snapshot in his ppa.  As upstream
wraps that up, I would anticipate they'll also do releases of a lot of
other bits and pieces that have git changes.  In an ideal world, all
that world will be done and packaged by Debian before June 25th, when
DebianImportFreeze will be in effect, but more realistically I
anticipate we're going to need to do a lot of manual sync requests and
minor merges through July.  The link above will be useful to keep track
of what needs done.


Aside from KMS, the big new feature of X.org this go-around is Xi2.
Could someone with a better pulse on Xi2 thanI share some thoughts about
its stability, what sorts of testing we should request users do (if
any), and any regressions we should be on the lookout for?


As to KMS, this is something we're focusing on heavily for Ubuntu.  I'd
love to see all of our video drivers support it, but at the moment it is
looking like just -intel and (partly) -ati.  I'm less optimistic about
-nouveau after having played with it a bit and reviewed test results and
status reports; it seems still a long way from being stable enough to
rely on.


Beyond features, we have plenty of bug reports:

  http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/totals.svg

We got a hefty surge in following the jaunty release that we still need
to slog through.  The good news is the rate of new bugs seems to have
leveled off.  The areas that grew the most were -intel, -nvidia, and
xserver.  I think with UXA in place, -intel is starting to get under
control finally:

  http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/drivers.svg

However -nvidia is not looking good.  Likely a lot of that growth is due
to dupe bugs, since I think no one has been triaging them.  If anyone
does look into this, and finds patches or versions we could pull to help
get a better handle on things, please report it to this list.  It would
be nice if we could get that curve flattened out.


Finally, I'd just like to say thank you to everyone helping work on X in
ubuntu, from packaging, to testing, to bugs, to docs.  I know there's
plenty of other interesting open source projects out there, so it's very
exciting to see we're accumulating a good team around ubuntu-x.

Bryce