Compositor status

[Jasper Huijsmans]

Olivier Fourdan wrote:
>>>I would vote for an alpha release, some other devs would agree
>>>probably :)
>>>
>>
>>yes... i tend to think it's pretty important that we get an alpha out.  
>>i don't see why the compositor can't wait until afterwards.  it can be 
>>disabled by default until it's considered stable.
> 
> 
> I would tend to agree. Just one thing, if it's not in the alpha, it
> won't be in 4.2 and it should wait for xfce 4.4.
> 
> Anything that is not in the alpha/beta release cycle won't be in the
> final 4.2 release.
> 
> Now, with more than a 1 year release cycle, it means that we won't get
> the feature in xfce before mid 2006 and by that time, other DE will have
> it for long.
> 

Like everyone else (including you I presume) I'm in two minds about 
this. Getting an alpha out is good, but staying without support for 
compositing while everyone else has it, is bad.

Two new facts have entered the equation: 1) Composite extension is still 
very buggy, 2) getting support into xfwm4 takes more time.

With that in mind I think we should probably go ahead and release the 
alpha next week and postpone composite support until 4.4. People who 
can't live without composite support can still use xcompmgr.

Afterwards we can have a discussion about how to shorten our release 
cycle. Not allowing us to add features to 4.2 is a good start ;-)

I do think it is important to make the switch to bugzilla before the 
alpha release. Brian, Auke, any ETA on that?

	Jasper

PS
If we're not going to add feature, we might just as well call it a beta 
release. It is pretty stable already.