[Mesa-dev] [PATCH 0/3] Support for Android RGBX/RGBA formats

[Adam Jackson]

On Mon, 2016-04-25 at 16:49 +0100, Emil Velikov wrote:

> Was thinking of that one but forgot to explicitly mention it. What is
> the "age gap" between the xserver and the dri modules that you ship ?
> I'm thinking that the above 3 years "gap" + ~9months of deprecation
> period should be fine with you guys ?

What I mentioned above about "rebases" is true of the whole of the gfx
stack. It's trochaic, even numbered releases (including 7.0) are 'major
updates' where mesa and xserver version change and there's no internal
ABI guarantee; minor releases like 7.1 are more usually updating to a
newer stable from the same branch, picking up individual bugfixes, and
spot updates for new ASIC support.

So the age gap in one sense is up to one minor release. 7.3 xserver
plus 7.2 mesa should work fine, for example. That said, it _tends_ to
work fine to vary xserver and mesa independently, since the drivers
continue to expose (and the loaders continue to implement) the same
interfaces as they did in 7.0. If that ever became not true - if 7.6's
mesa drivers only expose interfaces added in 7.2 or later - well, okay,
rpm has versioned conflicts, we can deal with that in the sense that we
can prevent you from getting into "definitely won't work"
configurations. But we'd like to preserve some bisectability, and three
years of bisectability sounds like a reasonable balance.

- ajax