On 29/06/07, Alberto Ruiz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
2007/6/30, Alan Coopersmith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> > So, now that I've bored everyone to sleep, this leaves us with these
> > possibilities for Indiana on SPARC:
> >
> > 1) Ship Xsun binaries & existing SPARC Xsun driver binaries (all closed
> > source)
> >
> > 2) Ship Xorg & use Martux's SPARC graphics drivers (all open source)
> > with existing SPARC kernel driver binaries (all closed source)
>
> There is also a third choice I forgot to mention, probably since it's
> the least desirable of all:
>
> 3) Ship Xorg with only the drivers provided by SPARC graphics (of which
> only XVR-2500 is likely to be done by your October proposed timeline),
> and leave those with older SPARCs unable to run X in Indiana.
>
> Also, Garrett reminded me of another issue in a message to ogb-discuss [1]
> - my prior description only covered 2D graphics, and ignored OpenGL. For
> OpenGL, a similar choice will have to be made:
>
> 1) Ship existing SPARC OpenGL, with accelerated modules for existing
> SPARC graphics cards (closed source - and I don't know if it's
> redistributable) - with Xsun, this has acceleration for most of the
> mid-to-high end SPARC graphics cards, with Xorg, only XVR-2500 is
> known to have usable hardware acceleration - I don't know if the
> others will easily work with Xorg or not once the framework is in
place.
>
> 2) Ship open source Mesa OpenGL, as we do on x86 (and virtually all other
> open source OS'es do), accepting that we'll have no hardware
acceleration
> and break compatibility with existing SPARC OpenGL applications
I think that keeping the opensource flag on indiana is more important.
However, (as pointed in a recent mail in other thread), we can focus on make
the retrieving through internet of those binary bits rocking easy after live
session or install. Does this idea make sense?
More important than giving users fully working hardware out of the
box? That doesn't seem reasonable. Users don't care about "open
source," they care about supported, working hardware.
If the "open" option is fully functional and supported, sure, it can
be used in place of the other. But as long as there is a better,
redistributable option, that's the one we should be using to give the
user the best experience possible "out-of-the-box."
--
Shawn Walker, Software and Systems Analyst
[EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://binarycrusader.blogspot.com/
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. " --Donald Knuth
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