[Mesa-dev] [Bug 34361] Mesa needs a man-page or several

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34361

--- Comment #5 from Sergey Kondakov <virtuousfox at gmail.com> 2011-02-17 07:46:21 PST ---
it _is_ very interesting link, especially part with:
"Due to their specificity and volatility is _not worth to have all driver
specific environment variables here_. An interesting way to list them is to do:
    * strings /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/dri/<driver>_dri.so | grep DEBUG"

i'd say that specificity and volatility is exactly the reasons to have them
properly documented but page suggest to poke the damn binary.

there are bits and pieces like that and you can't be sure if it does what it
says it does or that it even works. only devs who go around insides can
reliably say what the hell the situation with all those variables is.

when there are news about some new feature or a problem with some functionality
and people go for advice to some place like Phoronix forums they can be quite
surprised that there is some hidden switch. i can see benefits of putting
temporary/undocumented env. vars for developers but they surely don't want to
be single testers of their code or worse, to forget to remove them later (and
something tells me - there are plenty of those) or something like that.
if one would want to write a manual the last thing he would want is snooping
around a load of code, htmls and watch in binaries unless one does that already
on daily basis. and if one wants just RTFM, it's not very cool to have him to
write it first.

so, it's not just about having a manual but also about updating it, i.e.
documenting development more which is thing for devs to do.

but, i still need to understand why damn googleearth segfaults on both my
machines with r300g and r600g and for that i need some more output from libGL
and r*00_dri before crash and for that i need to find radeon switches and
_maybe_ i will not be lazy in that moment and come up with something :) no
promises or commitment though yet.

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