XFree86 still amazingly active.

Quite a while ago, the XFree86 people managed to finally piss off everyone with their license change to the XFree86 1.1 license, so that everyone upped and went back to X.org. After that, they released XFree86 4.5.0, but nobody's been looking. So, I wondered whether they'd still be active, and what would be going on. The X source is quite a lot, it'd be hard to manage that with just a couple of people. Would be interesting to see what they've been up to, I thought.

So I went and had a look at their CVSweb server, to see what the recent commits were. If there were any.

Well, there have been. The latest commit I saw was the one by David Dawes, all over the tree, done 11 days ago. It goes like this:

===================================================================
RCS file: /xf86/anoncvs/cvs/xc/lib/X11/ConnDis.c,v
retrieving revision 3.32
retrieving revision 3.33
diff -u -r3.32 -r3.33
--- xc/lib/X11/ConnDis.c	2004/06/24 02:21:15	3.32
+++ xc/lib/X11/ConnDis.c	2006/01/09 14:58:24	3.33
@@ -1,4 +1,3 @@
-/* $Xorg: ConnDis.c,v 1.8 2001/02/09 02:03:31 xorgcvs Exp $ */
 /*
  
 Copyright 1989, 1998  The Open Group
@@ -24,7 +23,7 @@
 in this Software without prior written authorization from The Open Group.
 
 */
-/* $XFree86: xc/lib/X11/ConnDis.c,v 3.31tsi Exp $ */
+/* $XFree86: xc/lib/X11/ConnDis.c,v 3.32 2004/06/24 02:21:15 tsi Exp $ */
 
 /* 
  * This file contains operating system dependencies.

Yes, very crucial commit. Wait, it gets better: the commit message says 'Remove most foreign cvs keywords.' "Most"? You mean you've been slaving at all those files, carefully removing the Xorg headers, and you've left some behind? Are you kidding?

But I'm not being very fair to them, obviously. There've been more commits over the last year, and most of those did not relate to comments in the code. They relate to the Imakefiles. They've been doing nothing but fixing the build system. Wonderful, isn't it? Those pesky Imakefiles...

So that's it? Comment changes and build fixes? Nothing else?

Well, no. I'm lying. There's also been this:

 161. Implement a major #include rework throughout the tree.  Also enforce it
      for all non-external builds (i.e. in-tree & SDK)  (Marc La France).
 160. Rework the building of hw/xfree86/parser to be more in line with the
      building of other server subdirectories (such as common/)
      (Marc La France).
 159. ANSIfy /xc/lib/font/builtins/, and fix warnings, whitespace & formatting
      (Marc La France).

A major #include rework? Wonderful. Must be some great new feature, right?

Almost:

@@ -62,8 +61,8 @@
 
 #include "attributes.h"
 
-#include "Xlib.h"
-#include "Xresource.h"
+#include <X11/Xlib.h>
+#include <X11/Xresource.h>
 #include "Xrm.c"
 
 static XrmDatabase CopyDb(XrmDatabase inDb);

Yes, very useful.

I didn't go through the entire tree (have better things to do) but, really; if this is the average quality of the commits they've been doing, one wonders why they don't just give up. Oh well...