On Sun, Mar 02, 2003 at 01:35:08PM +0000, Ian Molton wrote: > On Sun, 2 Mar 2003 11:58:44 +0000 José Fonseca > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > To me, thats arse backwards. It should be that the documentation > > > eases people into develpoing the code. not the other way round. > > > > But there *are* specs for the Voodoo 3, so what are you complaining > > about!? I'm sorry to give such breaking news, but things just > > _don't_ appear by themselves. Not a DRI driver, not documentation, > > ... *nothing*. > > I wasnt complaining about the voodoo3. At the time I wanted to help > fix problems on my radeon 7500. I gave up, however, when it was clear > no-one would give me any specs at all, unless I did something like > rewrite half the driver to 'prove' myself. (the mail archives are full > of stuff like that).
Indeed. The mail archives show alot of people which started with the same or less resources and background as you have but did substancial constributions. Don't blame the system just because you aren't motivated or able to do the same. > > I agree that documentation is important and there is alot that can > > be done in that field, but then why don't developers-wanna-be, > > instead of whinning about lack of documentation, don't do something > > about it? > > Because when you're a 'developer wanna-be' you dont have the knowledge > to DO anything about it. To write documentation? You probably didn't read a _single_ word of what I said in my previous post about it. Your loss. > > BTW, Doxygen documentation for a subset of the radeon driver, the > > core of Mesa, the full DRM are in the forge - under the embedded > > Mesa umbrella. > > Thats a really logical place to find them. really. (well, the mesa > core, ok, but the radeon driver stuff should be under the DRI > umbrella. Stop the irony. As I said above is still being written, so what do you care where I'm commiting it? The code documentation is being written in _purpose_ for the embedded Mesa and of course it's there that it is being commited to. It will, at some point and to the extent allowed by the shared code, be merged into the original sources. Anyway, once it's finished the resulting HTML pages should be hosted somewhere on DRI website, so it doesn't even matter where the documentation sources are. > > Note that documentation only helps until a certain point. No matter > > how much documented the existing code base is, > > No, its a matter of how documented the HARDWARE is. the code I dont > really care about. Not hard to figure out code. You surely never looked to the Voodoo 3 specs, or you wouldn't say that. An existing DRI driver has much more relevant information for a developer than the hardware specs. The hardware specs basically consist of an introductory scheme of the hardware architecture plus a bunch of tables to describe the meaning of each hardware register. In rare cases, an actual programmer's manual is written, but most of the content is dedicated to 2D graphics (setting up modes, etc.), and very little to 3D. Hardware specs are only good for one thing: to write a small function around a certain functionality, and forget about them. Once these functions are written, there is very little need to look back to them. Again I feel that I'm telling things which are pretty obvious for someone who has been contact with the DRI development for some time. If you haven't realized this by now, I have little hope I can convince you otherwise, so as far as I'm concerned this thread ends here. You can get back now to your "dri-has-no-docs-and-developers/ihvs-are-elitists" speech for all I care. José Fonseca __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
