[Mesa-dev] forking shared intel directory?

[Patrick Baggett]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 1:29 PM, Eric Anholt <eric at anholt.net> wrote:

> Long ago, when porting FBO and memory management support to i965, I
> merged a bunch of code between the i915 and i965 drivers and put it in
> the intel directory.  I think it served us well for a long time, as both
> drivers got improvements from shared work on that code.  But since then,
> we've talked several times about splitting things back apart (since we
> break i915 much more often than we improve it), so I spent yesterday and
> today looking at what the impact would be.
>
>
I'm not a developer, but I like to keep up with the drivers that I have
hardware for. Please take my opinions with a grain of salt.

When you say you break i915 more than you improve it, do you mean to say
that it is difficult to improve !i915 without breaking i915 and therefore
to improve development speed, it should be forked OR that i915 doesn't
receive enough testing / have maintainers who can resolve the issues and so
it burdens other developers to fix i915 and hence slows development?

The reason I ask if because if it is #2, then it sounds like you should be
looking for someone to volunteer as the official i915 maintainer [and if
none, then fork], but if it is #1, then maintainer or not, it will slow
down your efforts.




> LOC counts (wc -l):
>
>             intel/     i915/       i965/         total
> master:     14751      13458       61109         89318
> fork-i915:  0          24322       74978         99300
>
> We duplicate ~10000 lines of code, but i915 drops ~4000 lines of code
> From its build and i965 drops ~1000.
>
> context size:
>                i915        i965
> master:        99512       101456
> fork-i915:     99384       100824
>
> There's a bunch of cleanup I haven't done in the branch, like moving
> brw_vtbl.c contents to sensible places, or nuking the intel vs brw split
> that doesn't make any sense any more.
>
> I'm ambivalent about the change.  If the code growth from splitting was
> <7000 lines or so, I'd be happy, but this feels pretty big.  On the
> other hand, the cleanups feel good to me.  I don't know how other
> developers feel.  There's a branch up at fork-i915 of my tree.  If
> people are excited about doing this and I get a bunch of acks for the
> two "copy the code to my directory" commits, I'll do those two then
> start sending out the non-copying changes for review.  If people don't
> like it, I won't be hurt.
>
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>
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