Wiki like documentation Was: Re: Wrapping up 7.4 (finally)

[Daniel Stone]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 05:51:48PM -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 12:19 -0700, Mohan Parthasarathy wrote:
> > Perhaps, i am asking for too much. But some of the things that can
> > improve the current situation.
> > This is from a newbie perspective. So, please feel free to discard
> > it :-)
> > 
> > - An up to date X architecture document that can be maintained on an
> > ongoing basis
> 
> Amazingly, ddx.ps.gz in the existing docs package is a really good start
> at this.  No one seems to read it.  Why not?

To be fair, it does need to cover a few more subsystems, and how XFree86
behaves, as opposed to how DDXes should behave.  But still, yes, it's a
very good start.

> > - Some description of the source tree as to how the code is organised.
> > I understand that this is a huge task. But there is so much code that
> > sometimes it is hard to locate the functionality.
> 
> In master, according to sloccount, the X server is well under half a
> million lines.  Is this big?  How small do we need to make it?

They're not half a million entirely tractable lines.  How many people
can tell you what the input processing pipeline even vaguely is from
start to finish? Can you tell me, off the top of your head, the
subsystems involved in rendering and exactly what they do?

It's not that huge (and getting smaller every day, thank god), but the
reality is that you can't just look at one bit of code and go 'okay,
this does foo'.  It's a tangled mess: actually being able to predict
what a piece of code viewed in isolation will do is something that
generally only comes after quite some time of context accumulation.

Cheers,
Daniel
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