[Mesa-dev] so the development model is working?

[Keith Whitwell]

> I happen to do mesa development work on about 10 different machines,
> so yes I generally keep one mesa tree on each as close to master as I
> can get. Again you are developing for swrast or for vmware. Try
> developing for something like radeon and intel on different days, I
> have to keep a number of test boxes with r100->r600 cards in them,
> along with laptops at home where I idly do gallium work and also a
> pile of laptops in the office. I don't do any mesa development on my
> main workstation because I try to use it to read emails and stuff.  I
> know you guys have worked on hw drivers in the past, but its always
> been quite focused on one platform at a time. I don't get that luxury
> working on a distro, the open bug list for 3D drivers on Fedora is
> quite large and involves hopping machines and swapping hw
> configurations quite a lot.

Actually, I'm sure I've done as much diverse development on different
target machines as anybody here.  10 machines was hardly atypical.  My
approach is straightforward, and scaled well to the situations you're
describing.

Basically I never touch the target machines except to reboot them.
All interaction is with my main machine (at home or office), usually a
laptop.  On that machine I have a lot of trees, as Brian described,
and scripts which:
 - recognize the tree surrounding the PWD
 - sync it to the remote machine
 - invoke make on the remote machine with the remainder of the command
line arguments.
 - perform any manipulation on the compiler output to get emacs to
understand it locally.

That way I can do things like:

   rmake test-i965 foo

from inside emacs, have the remote machine kick off a local build, and
have emacs treat it as if it were local.

The remote machines have basic OS install plus relevant dev tools.
It's possible to develop & test on several target machines
simultaneously in this way.

Keith