[Mesa-dev] [RFC] Deprecating old DRI loaders/drivers

[Ian Romanick]

What *actual* problem are you trying to solve?  Honestly, it seems like
you're just trying to find stuff to do.  We have a mechanism to make
this work, and it's not that hard.  Introducing a deprecation period and
everything that involves will make it more work, not less.

On 05/16/2017 06:05 AM, Emil Velikov wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> As many of you know the current DRI interface provides backwards
> compatibility between old loaders and new drivers, and vice-versa.
> 
> Sometimes issues cannot be addressed with the existing extensions and
> we need to bump the version or provide an alternative extension.
> In such cases we still preserve the old buggy code path.
> 
> Even when that's not the case, we still end up with highly divergent
> code, as some features are exposed only when the extension criteria is
> met.
> 
> 
> At the moment we claim to support any loader <> driver combination in
> existence, while in reality components from different Mesa versions
> are rarely tested.
> One noticeable exception is the legacy DRI1 drivers. Therefore this
> proposal does _not_ cover any DRI1 specific changes.
> 
> To straighten the code flow and remove much of the unused code, I'm
> proposing the following:
> 
> 1) Establish deprecation period - keep in mind the DRI loader in Xserver.
> 2) Any extension that is supported on both driver and loader gets deprecated.
>   A) Drivers and loaders are annotated to emit a warning when used
> with 'too old' counterpart.
>   B) If applicable extensions are moved out of dri_interface.h to
> another header.
> 3) At the end of deprecation period:
>   A) Cleanup all the dead code.
> 
> Personally, 1 year sounds reasonable, as that constitutes of four Mesa
> major releases.
> For the other actions, I have patches around that I could polish and
> sending to the list.
> 
> I would greatly appreciate any input, esp. from distribution maintainers.
> 
> Should my proposal seem unsuitable, I would strongly encourage people
> to provide brief action plan alongside the obstacles they see.
> 
> Thanks
> Emil
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