Between my last post and the conversations here at EclipseCon, it’s been nothing but developers, developers, developers. But I wanted to take the time to thank one developer in particular; Gentoo’s Donnie Berkholz, a Friend of RedMonk, and whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year. Donnie’s been hard at work for a while now in breaking the monolithic X package in Gentoo into dozens (hundreds?) of separate subcomponents, modular X – a monumental undertaking. The componentization of the X package not only allows for fewer barriers to entry for X devs, it allows for more flexible remediation of individual pieces of X.
As with all of the other maintainers of Gentoo, not to mention other distros, Donnie’s not paid for this work at all. But the quality of the documentation they produce – such as the modular X migration guide here – surpasses that of any commercial operating system I’ve worked on.
So I just wanted to publically say “Thanks Donnie;” the effort is very much appreciated by this happy user. After following the directions this weekend, I upgraded to modular X with no problems whatsoever. I’ll probably break X when I get around to implementing Xgl, but for now I’m issue free.
