[Mesa-dev] DEATH to old drivers!

[Dee Sharpe]

On 8/24/2011 2:47 PM, Alex Deucher wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Dee Sharpe
> <demetrioussharpe at netscape.net>  wrote:
>> On 8/24/2011 2:11 PM, Ian Romanick wrote:
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>>> I'd like to propose giving the ax to a bunch of old, unmaintained
>>> drivers.  I've been doing a bunch of refactoring and reworking of core
>>> Mesa code, and these drivers have been causing me problems for a number
>>> of reasons.
>>>
>>> 1. The hardware is so old that it doesn't support a lot of features that
>>> have been common for 12+ years.
>>>
>>> 2. The drivers are so unmaintained that even hacking in new features
>>> with dummy implementations is painful.
>>>
>>> 3. The drivers are so buggy that many piglit tests hang the GPU.  I
>>> tried doing a piglit run on a Rage128 Pro that I have, but I gave up
>>> after having to blacklist 15 tests.
>>>
>>> It also seems that at least some distros (e.g., Fedora) have stopped
>>> shipping non-DRI2 drivers.  If nobody is shipping it, nobody is using it.
>>>
>>> My specific proposal is:
>>>
>>>   - Remove all DRI1 drivers: i810, mach64, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx,
>>> and unichrome.
>>>
>>>   - Remove all unmaintained Windows drivers: gldirect, icd.
>>>
>>>   - Remove beos.
>>>
>>>   - Remove fbdev (this is swrast on raw fbdev).
>>>
>>> Opinions?
>> Rather than completely getting rid of these drivers, can they just be moved
>> to an archived branch with a side note in one of the README files or
>> something? Many of these drivers give examples of how these systems
>> interfaced with Mesa3d back when they still worked. They'd serve as a great
>> starting point for implementers who'd like to bring those platforms back up
>> to speed with the rest of the platforms that run Mesa3d.
>>
> You can see them in the git history and the old release tags and
> branches.  That should cover it.
>

Ok, well, that's good enough for me!

-- 

Dee Sharpe

The difference between what IS done
&  what COULD be done is relational to
what you ARE doing&  what you COULD be doing!