The Process For Eventually Releasing X.Org Server 1.21

While formally the X.Org Server aimed to put out a new feature update every six months, in recent years they have been well off that trajectory with not much feature activity going on especially now that GLAMOR / XWayland / xf86-video-modesetting have stabilized and many Linux distributions eyeing Wayland by default. But there is now at least some little bit of interest in what's going into X.Org Server 1.21.

It's already been one year since the release of X.Org Server 1.20 and it doesn't appear the 1.21 update is imminent. Adam Jackson of Red Hat who has served as the release manager the past several cycles says he was asked off-list by an unnamed person about what goes into releasing a new version of the xorg-server.

As a result, he's put out some guidelines on the general flow now in a Gitlab-driven world (rather than BugZilla used in the past) of establishing a release schedule and blocker bugs around the next release. But the schedule and blocker bugs aren't filled in at this time, just setting up the entries within Gitlab.

Details on the expected X.Org Server release process under a Gitlab workflow are outlined on the xorg-devel mailing list should anyone be interested in stepping up to manage the next feature release.

It doesn't look like Red Hat is in any rush to have a new release with X.Org Server 1.20 point releases being in good shape for XWayland and now both Fedora and RHEL8 using GNOME Shell's Wayland session by default. Without their resources/need, it could be a waiting game before seeing 1.21.