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

[tom fogal]

"Bridgman, John" <John.Bridgman at amd.com> writes:
> re: the overall development model, my main question would be whether
> continuing work on a release branch after the initial release is
> really still require d now that we have quarterly major releases for
> all the major components.

FWIW, the frequency of Mesa releases is daunting for our project.  We
could really go for branches which are maintained for longer periods of
time.

Our test suite is (almost) entirely based around saving images and
comparing to baselines, all of which have been generated via swrast.
We currently generate 2200+ images every run of our test suite.  A Mesa
upgrade means some poor jerk (read: me ;) needs to flip his eyeballs
over every single image and either recreate the baseline or mark it
'bad'.

It's so daunting that nobody in our group had touched Mesa since 5.0,
before I showed up around here, perhaps a year ago now.  We're now
running 7.5, and I know of one Mesa bug and two bugs which appeared
when we upgraded Mesa but I haven't categorized yet... but Mesa 7.5 is
unsupported now.

If we had stable branches that lasted longer, and probably skipped some
major releases, that would be a real boon.

I am not knowledgable enough, nor do I have the time available to be
able to maintain such a branch.  However if Dave and/or others are
interested in such branches, I would gladly contribute.

Just my $0.02.

-tom