To The Point Of Collapse

Xorg Progress
I didn't make it in time for dinstall today, but I uploaded xorg-6.8.2.dfsg.1-6 to unstable a few minutes ago. Most of the fixes aren't that exciting to the average user, but we did clear out a few developer-related bugs that are holding Xorg out of testing. The big thing is that David Martínez Moreno kicked some serious ass and not only fixed a lot of those RC bugs, but he even backported the savage driver from CVS HEAD! So savage users, you've now got the latest stuff around.

Meanwhile I've been whittling away at 6.9rc0. I've finally managed to produce packages and run the thing, so the majority of it is good to go. Once I got the basic build issues worked out, Michel Dänzer suggested that we switch the way our xserver-xorg-dbg package was built. In the past, the code that loads the individual drivers and other modules in to the X server was a source of serious problems, and because of that the debugging server was built entirely staticly linked, with every driver and module built in to the thing no matter what video card you had. For 6.9 the default loader has been switched to a much better one, so Michel suggested we make a more normal -dbg package. This sounded like a good idea to me, so I spent a few days working that out, and it seems to be finished. There are 100 files that I was able to remove from the debian packaging dir (a lot less to keep track of!) and the -dbg packages for all the libraries in addition to the xserver have shrunk considerably. As such, these packages should take up less space on your hard drive, should you ever need to install them.

With that out of the way, we have a few more things before I can actually upload 6.9rc0 to experimental. Upstream has split out xterm and we'll be doing the same. xterm has lived at Thomas Dickey's website for a long time now, and we're finally going to start using that as our primary upstream for the program. David Martínez Moreno has volunteered to take this on, and he already has the work done, it's just waiting for an svn repo creation. I also need to update both the render and xrender packages in experimental, since Xorg requires both to build. Once these things are done, 6.9rc0 will hit experimental, hopefully beating rc1 out of the gate. From there, some basic tuning on 6.9 will be ongoing while we work on getting the 7.0 packages moving. Things are happening, and while they might not be as fast as I'd hoped, I'm pretty happy with how they're progressing.

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