On Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:18:38 +0200 Michel Dänzer <mic...@daenzer.net> wrote: > > What're your concerns? > > First of all, surely the onus is on those who want to move the drivers > into the xserver tree to present convincing arguments in support of > it.
I think you've been present at some of the earlier conferences when we discussed this. The arguments haven't changed, we've just had more experience with how well (or not) things are working. My experience with xserver master has been poor lately. And not just due to proto changes; we've had some painful ABI breaks as well (remember the DRI2 ABI stuff from 1.6.x?). More than that, major server releases have been inconsistently timed, mostly due to a lack of developer time afaict. Moving a core set (i.e. those actively maintained and required by most X distributions) of drivers into the server would go a long way toward making these issues less severe IMO. ABI changes would include caller updates in the same tree, making bisection much easier. And driver developers would suddenly have a large reason to make sure server releases get out on time. There are obvious downsides though; as you mention drivers with incompatible licenses or that couldn't be in-tree for whatever reason would still have to provide external releases (we'd still have to preserve ABI across stable versions though), and it would likely mean major driver changes would be released less frequently than they are today (every 6 months instead of 3 or less). > Anyway, this seems like a done deal, so I won't spend much more energy > on it. It's definitely not a done deal yet. And it won't be until the drivers move into the core repo. Anyway, that's my thinking. No conspiracy or anything. I just want to see regular, high quality server releases with well integrated and tested drivers. The Linux kernel uses this model, and while it arguably makes life more difficult for people enabling new hardware, it definitely has benefits for the project as a whole. -- Jesse Barnes, Intel Open Source Technology Center _______________________________________________ xorg-devel mailing list xorg-devel@lists.x.org http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel