On Wed, 6 Jun 2001, Andreas Ehliar wrote:
>> Perhaps, but it is a very very very minimal NDA. Definitely not
>> an evil NDA, or many people myself included wouldn't agree to it.
>
>Certainly, but you have to be "inside" to have any chance of
>getting this NDA. That is my impression at least. If you aren't
>already well known you wouldn't know what questions to ask the
>hardware company and you will therefore get the standard answer
>about secret and proprietary information which they regretfully
>cannot disclose to you.
>(If you are a member of the XFree86 project you will have access
>to some documentation though, but I can't see any particularly
>new specifications there.)
If someone is truely dedicated enough to work on XFree86 code,
they won't have problems getting the information they need, nor
becoming a registered developer IMHO.
>> The DESIGN document is pretty much a good start.
>
>Lets not forget xc/doc/hardcopy/Xserver/ddx.PS.gz
>(Not available in the DRI tree)
>It doesn't contain any information about XAA or DRI or so, but
>it does contain quite a lot of useful information about the core
>parts of X if you need it.
Yep.
>> While that may be true, there are many people working on drivers
>> who are college/university students as well.
>
>*raises hand* :)
>Not that I have contributed anything into the main tree as yet,
>but I'm working on getting 3D-acceleration on the second head of a
>G400 working right now. (Which hopefully is going to be clean enough
>to add, or at least provide a good starting point for some more
>experienced DRI/X-hacker.)
You're proof of concept then. ;o)
>> The main reason IMHO is that XFree86 is very large and takes many
>> months to be able to just navigate the source tree, and begin to
>> understand the Imake build system, etc. As in kernel
>> development, one must have a deep interest in overcoming the
>> initial learning curves to get seriously involved in something
>> like this. It certainly isn't a one-nighter thing one can just
>> pick up.
>
>There are also no list of (easy) stuff that needs to be done.
>If such a list existed and pointed out roughly which files you
>would need to look at it might be a nice introduction to
>XFree86-hacking. On the other hand, maintaining such a list
>might be more troublesome for a seasoned XFree86-hacker than doing
>the work oneself.
Sure there are smaller things that need to be done. I'm no DRI
hacker by far. I've only worked on smaller stuff myself,
definitely nothing I'd consider amazing rocket science. People
can work on fixing build warnings for example, manpages, other
documentation perhaps.
If someone is truely anxious to do XFree86 work, one MAJOR area
that needs doing, is porting the remaining 3.3.6 servers to the
4.x driver model. The DESIGN doc, and a few others included in
the sources, coupled with perhaps some hardware specs, and some
sample hardware is a good start, along with the free time to do
it. I would like to hack on some of that myself but higher
priority issues prevail.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike A. Harris Shipping/mailing address:
OS Systems Engineer 190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie,
Red Hat Inc. Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3
http://www.redhat.com Phone: (705)949-2136
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Latest XFree86 test RPMS: ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris/testing
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