Xserver driver merging pros & cons

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Sep 16, 2011, at 12:45 PM, Stéphane Marchesin wrote:

> Well, the issue is not separate. Driver repos are straightforward to
> get changes in and therefore can move forward easily.

How would that be different from an xorg-server tree with the exact same privileges?  I don't see any difference as far as individual contributors are concerned.

> For xserver changes, with the amount of latency/difficulty involved, people don't
> even try.

Can you be specific?  What latency are you talking about?

1) Is it latency getting a [PULL] or a ready [PATCH] applied?  Perhaps we can address that.

2) Is the latency involved due to missing reviews?  We need more people to step up and actually review.  Yes, this is a problem which we need to discuss.

3) Is the latency involved due to reviews which come back with comments rather than Reviewed-by: tags that developer is lazy in responding to and thus don't bother because "my patch is good enough for me, why should I change it to appease reviewer X".  If this is the case, I think it's good that the patch wasn't committed but bad that it dropped on the floor.  Yes, I understand that it can feel like a waste of time to go back and edit a commit to respond to a reviewed, but doing so will make your commit BETTER and possibly prevent regression.


WRT driver contributors specifically:

There is nothing preventing the drivers from having their own xorg-server tree with the same commit privileges that currently exist for the drivers.  Everyone developing drivers will continue to push to that, and periodically, it will merge into master or a stable branch as appropriate (and the result will be merged back into it).  Individual contributors don't need to worry.  The owner/maintainer of the driver just needs to email the release manager with a [PULL] request every few weeks.

Would it be easier if each driver had its own branch for feature work within the same git repo?  The only difference is really psychological at that point, but maybe that would make people feel better about it.