Depending on external libraries

[Kendall Bennett]

Keith Packard <keithp@keithp.com> wrote:

> > I don't think you can remove Mesa from the core X server source code. In 
> > fact I would argue that Mesa and DRI should in fact be merged *into* the 
> > core X server source code tree
> 
> What would be ideal is for the Mesa project to "own" the GL pieces up to a 
> stable ABI boundary and for X.org to ship only things on the other side.

Sure, if you can define that ABI properly. As it stands right now that 
ABI at the public level is the entire OpenGL API, very clean and 
consistent. However at the internal level it is a mismatch of DRM and 
direct integration with the 2D driver modules, so they are all highly 
dependedant on each other (and the DRM kernel modules too, which sucks).

> I'm not quite sure where that boundary should live though; the DRI
> 3D drivers and the X 2D drivers continue to have strong cross
> dependencies which would make it pretty infeasible to ship just
> the 2D parts and expect people to find the precise version of the
> DRI bits that matched. 

Exactly.

> And, the Mesa folks don't seem all that interested in also
> supporting 2D features like video and weird output modes, so we
> can't rely on them to provide the 2D driver on their own. 

I don't think they should. That is the realm of the 2D driver components 
and should be handled there (except for video textures perhaps ;-)

> I suspect we'll be dealing with DRI integration for some time to
> come, and people will end up selecting the video driver they use
> from X.org, DRI and GATOS depending on what features they think are
> most important.  I don't know how to solve this problem with our
> current architecture, but I hope that by working cooperatively
> with the other projects we can make some progress in the near
> term. 

My suggestion would be that once things are up and running with X.org, 
that the Mesa and GATOS projects are offered space and commit access 
within the same X server tree that X.org is using for the modular 
releases. 

I am sure that most of the DRI and GATOS developers would prefer to be 
working within the official X tree, and once that happens it will be much 
easier to get the release schedules in sync for all three projects.

Regards,

---
Kendall Bennett
Chief Executive Officer
SciTech Software, Inc.
Phone: (530) 894 8400
http://www.scitechsoft.com

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