[Mesa-dev] renaming i965g

[Chia-I Wu]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:
> Chia-I Wu <olvaffe at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Hi list,
>>
>> Per the discussion, i965g is confusing and misleading.  Instead of
>> preventing the confusions via
>>
>>   --with-gallium-drivers=i965g-unofficial or
>>   --with-gallium-drivers=experimental-i965g,
>>
>> which kind of makes i965g a second-class citizen, I think it is better
>> to rename it.  Then whenever one sees i965, be it on mailing list or
>> in a commit message, we know it refers to the official driver that
>> Intel supports.
>>
>> Let's say the new name is iFoo.  The gallium driver will be enabled
>> via --with-gallium-drivers=iFoo, and the DRI driver will be named
>> iFoo_dri.so.  Users will need to rename it to use it, and I hope this
>> extra step will avoid the confusions.
>>
>> I'd like to call it igen, so that I do not need to reflow the code
>> after running sed -i 's/i965/igen/g'.  But I am pretty bad at naming.
>> If this approach or the name is frowned upon, please let me know.
> But what you're building isn't an Intel gen graphics driver, right?
> You're just targeting gen7.  Are you planning on extending back to gen2?
>
> I think you should explicitly mark it experimental/unoffficial in the
> configure switch.  Otherwise build-it-themselves users see both options,
> and having heard about gallium, assume the gallium one is what they
> should be using, and then they suffer.
I should come up with another name then, one that does not imply if
the driver supports some GPUs.

In the scenario you described, a user knows he/she can choose from
either the gallium one or the classic one only because the drivers
have the same name.  If the user have to choose between
--with-dri-drivers=i965 and --with-gallium-drivers=ironman for his
Intel GPU, he sure will choose i965.  If he does choose ironman
without knowing what it is, firstly, the driver will not be loaded
because it is called ironman_dri.so.  Secondly, they keyword ironman
will appear in the bug reports and you will know they are not your
bugs.

--
olv at LunarG.com