hotplug plans - issue 1 (ideas welcome)

[Keith Packard]

<#part sign=pgpmime>
On Fri, 9 Mar 2012 07:46:35 +0000, Dave Airlie <airlied at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just can't see a nice way to do this incrementally and meet the
> requirement of the X release process. If we'd merged the drivers it
> would be much easier to just evolve things, but since some people
> dislike that idea, it means I have to go with the multiple APIs/flag
> day approach which really doesn't sit well with me.

Merging the drivers would make this easier, but could we do something
similar by having simultaneous 'development candidates' made for the
server and drivers that would build together? That way we could
incrementally modify the API and have fixed points in history where
drivers and server could be built together. Synchronizing the names of
these releases would let people tie the parts together for testing.

Pick a couple of drivers to do the development candidate work on, when
an API change was required, branch them and the server, and before the
DC was released, merge everyone back to master and tag the result in
each repo. Then, until another API change was required, work would occur
on master again.

If the API changes are extensive, this will make it harder to
make drivers portable to multiple server releases; do we need a
mitigation plan where we provide some level of hackish abstraction so
that drivers could be written for both APIs anyways?

-- 
keith.packard at intel.com