[Mesa-dev] Moving amdgpu/addrlib into a git submodule

[Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult]

On 10.08.2016 15:19, Nicolai Hähnle wrote:
> It would be nice to have something more concrete to go on, like what are
> the problems _really_ :)

Actually, I haven't understood who the other users of addrlib actually
are - is it just AMDs proprietary driver ?

> What pain do submodules give you that wouldn't be even _worse_ with a
> separate script for fetching external sources?

In the end - from dist perspective - it's the same kind of problem:
you still have to do extra steps to get a full source tree, and you'll
need to do extra downloads within the build process (unless you mirror/
merge it into your own repo, to create a full tree for the source
package) ... in either ways: really ugly.

> Look, there are a bunch of different use cases here. Distro packagers;
> Mesa contributors and bleeding-edge users; and us (which is slightly
> separate because we're not _just_ Mesa contributors but have parts of
> the stack elsewhere, which is why this is coming up in the first place).

ACK.

> Most of the complaints seem to come from distro packaging, though I have
> yet to understand what the exact problems are.

We need a 100% automatic build process - from the original source.
And we need an *easy* way to apply/deapply our local patches ontop of
the source tree - or even better: just have a git repo with just the
full tree.

If upstream doesn't provide that, all the distros out there have to invent
their own mechanisms to transform upstream's mess into sth useful - and
that needs to support easy rebasing.

> For us, in addition to avoiding the same hassles there's the question of
> maintainability, and perhaps (with a huge load of optimism) getting the
> closed source folks a bit more involved in the fact that there's another
> world out here as well.

The hassle comes from the fact that source tree's (instead of having
libraries) directly shared between projects in the first place. So, the
root is having a bad sw architecture.

Why can't we just solve the root problem instead of burning our time
w/ workarounds ?


By the way: just had a quick look into addrlib and found several
defines which aren't used anywhere (in mesa):

https://github.com/metux/mesa/commit/a38def1c9c6ac09c151399ec1f91b92a5fac3eb0

Maybe there's another consumer for that, but then it would be private
to him and therefore should be defined there.


--mtx