[Mesa-dev] stupid development model causing more problems than its worth

[Dave Airlie]

Can we stop the stupid already?

from what I can see nobody that is shipping a real driver that Linux
distros want is able to work with the current system.

By this I mean only vmware are seeing value in it and we are being
held hostage by it.

Here's the thing you should *always* be working on master, *always*. I
don't care if you are shipping 7.7 in a product, you get a bug report,
reproduce it on master fix it on master, cherry-pick it back.

This pulling branches into master is insane, and it means that distros
are not able to ship useful code from the 7.8 branch as I discovered
this morning because none of intel/radeon/nouveau driver developers
are working on 7.8 branch, and lots of fixes are piled up in master
for them, that we can't cherry-pick now because of the stupid policy.

The thing is working on the stable branch is fine if you live in a
bubble and there is no chance that anyone might have fixed your bugs
already in master, but when we have drivers with a community around
them and maintainers, you can't just hide in 7.8 branch and ignore the
fact that someone else could quite literally have fixed it in master
already and didn't know or care about 7.8 or wasn't sure of its
suitability.

At this point I'm tempted to just git diff radeon between 7.8 and
master and drop the diff into 7.8 and leaving for the weekend.

Dave.