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It's certainly fair to say that most changes have happened because a developer thought it was better for the users, which may or may not turn out to be true.
What makes it complicated is that a lot of the changes you see are made not because *that* change is better for the users, but because the change is a pre-requisite for a *later* change which will be better for users.
DRI2 and memory management are a good example. They're a big pain in the butt for users and for distros, 'cause they just change a bunch of APIs and muck up builds without making anything visibly better.
But -- what both changes do is enable some other features (which have not been implemented yet) which users *do* definitely want -- flicker-free 3D under Compiz, higher levels of GL support, better performance, more reliable operation etc...
It would be nice if there was some kind of ongoing changelog for Xorg written from a user perspective. At minimum that would separate out the changes which are supposed to be better (so one can speak up if they don't seem to be an improvement) from changes which add pain in the short term but which enable a brighter future.
Or you could have a single dictator make all the decisions about what should be changed, which would probably give you a much cleaner roadmap and a more consistent vision of where X is going, but the open source community tends to be pretty intolerant of dictators unless they do most of the coding themselves.
What makes it complicated is that a lot of the changes you see are made not because *that* change is better for the users, but because the change is a pre-requisite for a *later* change which will be better for users.
DRI2 and memory management are a good example. They're a big pain in the butt for users and for distros, 'cause they just change a bunch of APIs and muck up builds without making anything visibly better.
But -- what both changes do is enable some other features (which have not been implemented yet) which users *do* definitely want -- flicker-free 3D under Compiz, higher levels of GL support, better performance, more reliable operation etc...
It would be nice if there was some kind of ongoing changelog for Xorg written from a user perspective. At minimum that would separate out the changes which are supposed to be better (so one can speak up if they don't seem to be an improvement) from changes which add pain in the short term but which enable a brighter future.
Or you could have a single dictator make all the decisions about what should be changed, which would probably give you a much cleaner roadmap and a more consistent vision of where X is going, but the open source community tends to be pretty intolerant of dictators unless they do most of the coding themselves.
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