Mesa is painful to bisect, I hope this can be improved

[Michel Dänzer]

On 2024-10-18 01:36, Timur Kristóf wrote:
> 
> It's not clear what your issue is exactly, it seems your problem may be
> that you try to build the entirety of Mesa and replace the version in
> your system that was shipped by your distro? Or that you bisect between
> very old very new versions?

I suspect the latter. To put it differently, the further back one needs to go for bisecting, the more likely one is to hit the issues Thomas described. I've certainly hit some of them myself.


> My process is having a meson setup configured to build just the driver
> I am interested in debugging and then I compile it and install to a
> local prefix without replacing the Mesa version shipped by my system.
> Then I run the application with that local Mesa version by pointing it
> to the Vulkan ICD of that version or setting the relevant environment
> variables for OpenGL. This works without affecting the rest of the
> system.

FWIW, you might not need to even install for this, "meson devenv" allows running apps using the Mesa binaries in a build directory.


> Other than that, I think it's normal and expected that the drivers
> evolve and some options change. Things that were experimental yesterday
> might become default tomorrow; things that were default last week might
> become obsolete or even removed.

As Thomas points out though, such changes potentially cause pain for people who need to bisect across them. So such changes shouldn't be done lightly but only if the benefits clearly outweigh that pain.


-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer       \        GNOME / Xwayland / Mesa developer
https://redhat.com             \               Libre software enthusiast