[SCM TRANSITION] Re: Proposal: move Randr protocol and library to git

Egbert Eich eich at suse.de
Tue Apr 18 23:33:05 PDT 2006


Forgot to mention:

Adam Jackson writes:
 > 
 > I'm becoming of the opinion that factoring the drivers out is more pain than 
 > it's worth, but I probably only say this because of the next point:
 > 
[...]
 > 
 > Honestly, having just bumped every video driver to account for the new ABI, 
 > the marginal cost of having to do so over multiple SCMs is trivial compared 
 > to the base cost of having to do so for each of 60+ drivers.

At least with CVS as currently set up you can do this all with one commit.
This is because drivers/ is the super module of all individual drivers.
If the changes are related - as in your case - this should not be considered
a policy violation.
The only additional work required is to modify the ChangeLogs of each driver.
This can be automated by hacking the prepate-Changelog.pl script.
Apart from this there is no more work than in a situation where we kept a
number of drivers in a single module.

 > > - To take advantage of a new and improved API a user may have to
 > >   upgrade numerous modules at once.
 > >   Even if ordinary users are expected to pick released tarballs for
 > >   this early adoperts and people interested in testing new features
 > >   still need to draw code directly from the SCM.
 > 
 > If this is ever the case (and it is), you're not releasing often enough.  
 > Wasn't "release early and often" the _mantra_ for modularization?

Also forgot to mention:
When doing maintenance work for existing products you often have to pick
individual patches instead of a completely new driver - no matter how often
the driver is released. 
This is a policy issue: your customer may only want to see his problem fixed 
- not a completely new driver which may introduce other regressions.
Therefore there is no way around the SCM.

Cheers,
	Egbert.



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