On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 09:23:38PM +0000, Alan Cox wrote: > > but simply being more enthusiastic about accepting contributions doesn't > > seem like a great plan (compare the code quality of nouveau, intel and > > radeon to that of some of the out of tree drivers, for instance) > > I think that is a little naïve. There is a difference between vendors > attempting to use Xorg as a "dump and run" for crap code, and being a bit > more relaxed about obscure drivers that are otherwise unmaintained.
I don't entirely agree. If people provide code review and the vendor maintainer's attitude is approximately "We're only willing to work with you if you accept our approach", I don't think that benefits us. It can be an opportunity for learning - I'm just not sure that it has been in the real world, so far. > X is a bit "odd" in other ways - it's history has been rather closed at > times which hasn't helped as it means there isn't a long standing large > developer base. That's certainly true. The small number of developers has been a longstanding issue, and the fact that companies can't really just pick up an existing developer makes all of this much harder. > It consists (for much of the relevant stuff) of a very small number of > very large and very complex drivers for insanely complex bits of > hardware. That doesn't have the same scaling for newbies the kernel does > where there are hundreds of random USB widgets you never knew you needed > that make good starting points. > > Maintaining the old Voodoo2 driver was a bit like minor kernel hacking. I > can't even imagine how KeithP fits everything he needs to know for the > intel drivers into his head. The lack of documentation for various aspects of the server doesn't help either. I found X development far more intimidating than getting involved in the kernel. -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org _______________________________________________ xorg@lists.freedesktop.org: X.Org support Archives: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg Info: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg Your subscription address: arch...@mail-archive.com
