[Mesa-dev] DEATH to old drivers!

[Ian Romanick]

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On 08/24/2011 03:28 PM, Corbin Simpson wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 3:14 PM, Luc Verhaegen <libv at skynet.be> wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 01:50:25PM -0700, Corbin Simpson wrote:
>>> +1. If anybody needs them, they're in git.
>>>
>>> Sending from a mobile, pardon my terseness. ~ C.
>>
>> *sigh* Software populism...
>>
>> But seriously. How would such a thing work?
>>
>> Drivers will be thrown out because none of those currently chiming care
>> about doing the extra bit of work needed to maintain at least some
>> highly standard interfaces.
>>
>> It seems that these less popular drivers are gone for good. Because what
>> would one have to do to get them back in? What are the criteria for
>> that? And how will such criteria evolve? Because stating "you don't have
>> features that some cards already implemented 12 years ago" is a pretty
>> shaky path to venture out on. What's next? "because i do not like the
>> people who develop?"* Now that would be very free and open indeed.
>>
>> The way the mesa monolith exists today, also leaves nothing to the
>> imagination. Once a driver is "dropped" there is also no way of
>> maintaining it externally.
>>
>> To further that: an attempt at proposing some rudimentary SDK, which
>> would shift the compatibility burden to the driver developers (to some
>> extent, this SDK will also not be allowed to move as shortsightedly as
>> before -- which in itself does not exclude evolution at all), wasn't
>> exactly hailed positively. Such infrastructure would've made such brash
>> "development" possible.
> 
> Ian's list of DRI1 drivers: i810, mach64, mga, r128, savage, sis,
> tdfx, and unichrome. I have mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx hardware, but
> not the time to maintain it, let alone get it into DRI2-land, at this
> time. If I suddenly get the time to do it, I'll gladly bring them back
> up to speed, but as it stands, they've been getting cargo-cult
> interface updates without any testing, and at some point it's actively
> harmful to keep shipping them without testing, isn't it?

I'll also point out that DRI2 isn't the only problem.  There are a lot
of refactors and optimizations that I'd like to do that will benefit
more modern cards.  However, due to missing (hardware) features and lack
of a maintainer, these older drivers make this somewhere between
impossible and excruciating.  That's what I'm really trying to
accomplish.  I want to reduce the ongoing maintenance of drivers that
are actively being developed.
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