The Latest X.Org Server Activity Are A Lot Of Code Reverts

The X.Org Server has been seeing a lot of commits this week... to revert bad code.

Many Phoronix readers have been asking why I haven't been covering news of the "X11Libre" fork of the X.Org Server or if I somehow missed it... No, simply a vote of no confidence. It's highly unlikely to succeed long-term given the very limited experienced developers / resources and none of the major Linux stakeholders (companies) backing it.

A great example now are all of the reverts hitting the X.Org Server Git code after longtime X.Org developers began going through the code committed by the "X11Libre" developer prior to his ejection from the FreeDesktop.org camp.

There was this revert for not handling copyright and license notices correctly. Some existing code macros were moved to a new file while dropping the existing copyright holders from being mentioned in the new file and only adding the new contributor to that header file. The code license was also changed from MIT AND X11 to MIT OR X11.

Also merged this week was this big revert of prior "RandR cleanups" that ended up breaking at least some RandR functionality.

There was also a revert to avoid unnecessarily breaking the NVIDIA driver. It was also commented by NVIDIA that some additional requests for other reverts are coming too.

There were also other reverts for code of questionable value. And other reverts making changes without knowing the prior knowledge for why some macros were added in the first place by X.Org developers.

And the list goes on with more reverts expected soon.