Since people seem to like it, I’ll be trying to publish some news about ongoing work on the XSF side, on a (possibly) regular basis. Let’s have a look at what happened since last time I blogged about X in Debian, mostly by checking what appeared in my =debian-x mailbox.

Debian XSF News #1

• mesa 7.9 was uploaded to experimental by Julien Cristau.

• Jurij Smakov uploaded a bunch of xserver-xorg-sun* drivers to experimental for us.

• I started a debian/xsf-tools.git repository to gather some tools for people wishing to work on X-related packages. For now it contains the usual tagging script, an mrconfig file to ease downloading/updating all XSF packages, thanks to the mr tool, and some bits of documentation. I also added the git URL to the upstream repositories to debian/watch* for all packages.

• Christopher James Halse Rogers started a discussion about the Ubuntu plans for Natty release. This is mostly about DRI, and unfortunately, I haven’t digged into mesa yet, but thankfully we had some answers from upstream there.

• I uploaded many xfonts-* packages, prepared by Julien Cristau.

• I uploaded many x11-* bundles as well. Why are we creating bundles? Because there are many tiny applications, which (from the distribution point of view) don’t deserve their own package. For example x11-apps contains “toys” like xclock, xeyes, or xlogo.

• I uploaded many lib* packages, plus pixman. When there were no fundamental changes (as in: no need for an shlibs bump, which could prevent some packages from migrating), those were uploaded to unstable, others went to experimental.

• Some cherry-picked patches were added to libx11, from a stable branch. The 2:1.3.3-4 version has been unblocked for squeeze, and brings support for Compose O A and for Compose \ o /.

• I also reverted the removal of the (famous?) apple:badmap and apple:goodmap options for macintosh keyboards in xkeyboard-configuration (which produces the xkb-data binary package), thanks to a bugreport from Yves-Alexis Perez; it’s been unblocked for squeeze as well. If someone notices an inversion of those keys after the upgrade, that’s probably because one of those options was added at some point, was ignored and unnoticed, and finally taken into account. Depending on the case, it’s sufficient to switch to the other one, or to remove it entirely.

• Many bug submitters were pinged by Julien Viard de Galbert. But another report should appear soon, following TXBW1 and TXBW2.

• More drivers were updated to their latest upstream versions, and uploaded to experimental.

• Thanks to an xserver-xorg-video-mga user (Ferenc Wágner), we were able to extract and apply a patch from launchpad’s #292214 to fix the dual head breakage. Since we haven’t seen any complains since then, we’ll probably ask for an unblock for squeeze.

What are the XSF plans?

• Keep close track of upstream work, possibly contributing there. We’re mostly up-to-date with the RC1 for X11R7.6 and it’d be nice to keep it that way, but that requires time/work.

• Keep on answering new bug reports quickly, before bug reporters vanish or switch to another system (a broken X can trigger this kind of reaction).

• Keep on pinging older bug reports. Anyone is welcome to join and help, there’s no high profile required to do so, as confirmed by Julien Viard de Galbert.

• To make it easier, it would be nice to have some documentation written down, instead of relying on everyone’s own memory. There’s a lot of wiki pages about X in Debian, but they might be outdated, incomplete, or inaccurate. Building up some consistent documentation should help people understand how they can contribute, and how to do so.

• It’d be nice to have some documentation targeted at users as well, so refreshing the old XSF FAQ would be welcome, as well as shipping it in some package for offline use.