time for amber2 branch?

[Erik Faye-Lund]

On Wed, 2024-06-19 at 10:33 -0400, Mike Blumenkrantz wrote:
> In looking at the gallium tree, I'm wondering if it isn't time for a
> second amber branch to prune some of the drivers that cause pain when
> doing big tree updates:
> 
> * nv30
> * r300
> * r600
> * lima
> * virgl
> * tegra
> * ???
> 
> There's nothing stopping these drivers from continuing to develop in
> an amber branch, but the risk of them being broken by other tree
> refactorings is lowered, and then we are able to delete lots of
> legacy code in the main branch.
> 
> Thoughts?

When we did Amber, we had a lot better reason to do so than "these
drivers cause pain when doing big tree updates". The maintenance burden
imposed by the drivers proposed for removal here is much, much smaller,
and doesn't really let us massively clean up things in a way comparable
to last time.

I'm not convinced that this is a good idea. Most (if not all) of these
drivers are still useful, and several of them are actively maintained.
Pulling them out of main makes very little sense to me.

What exactly are you hoping to gain from this? If it's just that
they're old hardware with less capabilities, perhaps we can address the
problems from that in a different way, by (for instance) introducing a
"legacy hw" gallium layer, so legacy HW details doesn't have to leak
out into the rest of gallium...