X.Org Server 1.11 Release Planned For Mid-August

It seems as if the X.Org project has finally formed a habit of wanting to release on time. In years past, even point releases have been more than 200 days late and there hasn't been much to their release schedules that were actually executed on time. It's something I had long pointed out and have received jabs back in turn, but the past few X.Org Server releases have been tagged on time, plus or minus a few days. It looks like X.Org Server 1.11 may be another on-time release, it's at least being planned right out of the starting gate.

Keith Packard has written to the xorg-devel mailing list about the X.Org Server 1.11 release process. Again, he volunteers himself to be the release manager for the major releases.

He also asks how the merge rules for the xorg-server are going and whether any policies need to be tightened or relaxed. Obviously with X.Org Server 1.10 there was the big mistake of pulling in version 1.4 of the Resize and Rotate (RandR) extension code only to realize at the very last minute that it needed to be pulled. This also resulted in a very last minute ABI break for the X.Org Server video drivers.

One of the changes for X.Org Server 1.11 proposed by Keith is to have an official protocol tree maintainer. For this position, Keith has nominated Daniel Stone based upon his X protocol work and voicing interest in the past for handling such work.

In sticking with the same six-month release cycle for the X.Org Server, Keith has laid out some tentative dates for delivering X Server 1.11 on the 19th of August. With this release schedule, the merge window for 1.11 would close on the 27th of May, the non-critical bug deadline would be the 29th of July, and a few release candidates would be sprinkled prior to the middle of August.

In a follow up message, Apple's Jeremy Huddleston has also volunteered to take over the X.Org Server 1.10.x stable point release management. Jeremy initially volunteered for this role with X.Org Server 1.9 stable series as Apple is using xorg-server 1.9 in Mac OS X 10.7, but he has decided to continue with xorg-server 1.10 although we don't suspect Apple will use any 1.10+ release until a "Mac OS X 10.8" release.

Some developers have also asked Keith Packard to communicate better while the merge window is open and he is not responding to emails on the status of patches.

Look for another news posting shortly about X.Org Server 1.11 features. This current release schedule, if met, should allow X.Org Server 1.11 to be in Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16.