stripping off "xf86-*-" from drivers

pcpa at mandriva.com.br pcpa at mandriva.com.br
Sun Jan 20 09:12:29 PST 2008


Quoting Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM>:

> Dave Airlie wrote:
>> Granted I'd be happy to move all the open source drivers back into the
>> server build and get rid of whole idea of a stable ABI between
>> releases...
>
> But then you'ld have to get all the driver maintainers to meet the
> release cycles of the X server, instead of letting Intel release
> quarterly, while ATI does developer snapshots for a year between
> stable releases.

  And also meet distributors schedules. But if anything, this shows
some problems with the idea of modular build. The major problem is
of course the somewhat frequent abi changes, or available choices,
like selinux and pciaccess.

  What I believe the modular build should enforce is to have a
consistent sdk to make it easy to experiment with latest bits,
but latest bits should build from source, for example, someone
wants to experiment with latest nouveau driver, should have an
easy way to build the X Server and Kernel modules, but from source.

  Afaik, sdks have been made available at least since XFree86 3.3.x,
and this should be enough to fix the problem of integrating and
putting recent snapshots in the basesystem. Note, I am completely
agains't binary only modules, but when there is no other option
due to political reasons, this should also make it easy for the
vendor to ensure consistency (the vendor would not care about
backports, etc, but with sources available, should not be a
problem).

  Right now I believe the concept of modular build isn't working
as I believe originally intended; instead of making it easy to "play"
with different options, it is just causing a very complex dependency
tracking problem, that should be resolved by the base package
management system.


Paulo






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