In Like Sin
Last night I uploaded the last major pieces of Xorg 7.0 to experimental, including the server itself. Today I came home and found that Joerg Jaspert had already approved them to go in. Big thanks for him for processing these things in record time. The packages currently only have a few of our Debian-specific fixes applied, and the next major step before uploading to unstable will be to get those ported from 6.9 to 7.0, and also to pull in patches like benh's radeon patch that fixes a lot of crashes in 6.9. As things stand now though, you can pull the packages from experimental for i386 and be running Xorg 7.0 in all its modularized glory. Hopefully a few of you version junkies will try them out and report bugs so we can hammer them in to shape for release!

I wanted to give another note of thanks to Eugene Konev. Eugene helped out quite a bit in the past, getting 6.8 and 6.9 in good shape for Debian. For 7.0, I had done a pretty poor job on the xfonts and he put in a ton of effort to polish them up. In addition, he packaged xdm and even ported all the patches for monolith over to that. He really helped me get this last bit over the hill, and he deserves a lot of credit for it.

I'm feeling pretty good about this because it represents the end of about a year's worth of work. I won't feel like it's the end until a set of packages I'm happy with ends up in testing, but until recently I wasn't sure I'd be able to get this far in time for etch. Yet somehow, here I am, looking like we'll definitely be shipping modular Xorg with etch. There's still this last 10% to go through though (and you know what they say about that) but I'm confident that the end of this task is in sight and I can start to move Debian's X work from playing catch up to helping define the cutting edge. Hopefully with everything going on people will be getting excited about X again, get involved, and we can keep making cool things happen.