What can I do?

[Florent Thoumie]

Rainer Goellner wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> As Mark Linimon told me in response to my grumbling
> post of yesterday, there's just one person left
> active at the moment. So I'd like be a little bit
> more constructive this time: Is there any _limited_
> area I can help to get that xorg thing into the
> ports tree in the conceivable future?

Probably not (explanation follows).

> What I have now is a working release 6.2 system,
> built around march 7, with xorg related ports from
> the git tree and X11BASE set to LOCALBASE. The
> hardware probably is kind of archaic, just an
> Athlon XP system and, yes, that _is_ special, a
> Matrox G550 connected to a real CRT. Sorry, didn't
> even try to get 3D working so far.

7th of march? Do you realise some people including me are using the git
tree since october? :-) Which also means I have to merge upstream
(regular ports tree) changes into xorg branch almost everyday so that
people can have current xorg ports *and* freebsd ports at the same time.

It's working for you without major breakage only because you're using
500 ports out of 16000+ (like I do, like almost everybody does). Still
some ports are breaking with the new xorg, or because of the prefix
merge. We're working on those ports. Have a look at [1] or [2] to get
regular updates on xorg work.

Believe me, I for one want to see everything going upstream as soon as
possible (I think I said that already).

> Any hints what I can help? I understand C/C++, am
> used to poke around in the system code (but not to
> using the debugger) and do have an idea how ports
> work, but didn't dig into the xorg sources very
> deep so far.

As you can see on [3], we're still committing fixes. We usually fix
those ports by ourselves (miwi, lesi and myself) but occasionally
forward them to maintainers when we can't figure out what's wrong or
when it requires non-trivial fix. When we fixed all ports broken in a
single experimental pointyhat build, a new one is scheduled and then we
get new errorlogs, ...

> And sorry for my grumbling; it just seemed so
> naturally to me to commit at last 'cause everything
> was working seemed flawless to me - so it really was
> more of an encouragement ;-)

No offense taken. You're not the first one to say that you'd like xorg
7.2 in ports now.

[1] http://planet.freebsdish.org/
[2] http://blog.xbsd.org/
[3] http://git.xbsd.org/?p=freebsd/ports.git;a=shortlog;h=xorg

-- 
Florent Thoumie
flz at FreeBSD.org
FreeBSD Committer

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