Tuesday February 15, 2005
alanc @ sun.com
Alan Coopersmith’s blog
Random thoughts of a disorganized mind...
(and though it should be obvious, while Sun pays me to think about things, they disclaim any responsibility for these thoughts, nor do I claim what I say matches in any way what Sun thinks)
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Tuesday February 15, 2005
Modular or Monolithic?
After the LinuxWorld Expo show floor closed today, a bunch of us from X.Org went out for dinner across the street at Vinny T's. The conversation eventually got down to the inevitable question - modular or monolithic? The monolothic choice seems more traditional, while the modular option is definitely a popular modern style. The problem of course was that the monolithic way means we all have to agree on the parts we want to get and get it all in one huge pile, while some people would rather limit their intake and the modular alternative allows them to get just as much as they want, while allowing those who want more to get it. We had people there from companies including Sun, HP, SuSE, and Red Hat, as well as open source developers not affiliated with any of our firms - but despite what our marketing departments and executives say about each other, we had a very friendly conversation, as we usually do. (Fighting for deals and competing with each other is for the sales & marketing people - the engineers just want to make our products the best they can be, and co-operating with each other is the most optimal way we've found to do that.) After a while it became clear that we couldn't all agree on the right mix of parts in a monolithic package that matched what all of us wanted, and didn't want to force our choices on those who came to the table later, so we went with the only logical choice and chose the modular delivery for our dinner - individual orders instead of a monolithic "family style" serving. The portions were still quite large and very good, though it was the dessert later at Finale that elevated the evening to completely excellent (and requiring a lot of walking the show floor tomorrow to work it off).
Now if only we could put the modular vs. monolithic source tree debate for Xorg to bed so easily, though I think the discussions we had here this week to work out what our concerns, issues, and goals for this change will help a lot in getting us to that point. We gave Kevin Martin a lot of feedback and he's working on putting something together that can get the discussion organized in the X.Org Modularization Working Group and hopefully avoid the endless rehashing of the issues that have stalled progress on this so far, so the working group can put together a plan that we can all agree we can live with. [Technorati Tag: Xorg]Posted at 09:12PM Feb 15, 2005 by Alan Coopersmith in X11 | Comments[2]
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