[RFC] merged void driver

[Peter Hutterer]

On 6/11/10 24:45 , Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 07:38:19AM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> Tiago Vignatti wrote:
>>> On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 10:21:33AM +1000, ext Peter Hutterer wrote:
>>>> I'm looking at having to fix a number of unmaintained drivers for ABI 12 and
>>>> because it's hopefully the last time I'll worry about multi-server support
>>>> for those drivers, I decided to see how much work it is to merge a driver.
>>>>
>>>> Current tree is on branch driver-merge in my xserver repo.
>>>> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/~whot/xserver/log/?h=driver-merge
>>>> Still rebasing where needed, but it's a start.
>>>>
>>>> My main grief at this point is the massive AM_CPPFLAGS define which I'd like
>>>> to see somewhere more central. In the current drivers, we can just use the
>>>> sdk directory, but these headers are all over the server's source tree.
>>>>
>>>> Any comments appreciated.
>>>
>>> Peter, can you please brief the motivation for merging specifically input void
>>> driver? I mean, we can start a server without input drivers, so why we would
>>> care about a void one?
>>
>> You could watch the video of the discussion at XDS that you slept through
>> where we discussed this.  8-)
>>
>> The short summary is:  xf86-input-void&  xf86-video-dummy *ONLY* change
>> when the X server ABI changes - they never have to support new models of
>> the "null" hardware, so can both serve as examples of driver updates to
>> new ABI's, and will never need to be separately backported to an older
>> server by a LTS/enterprise distro that needs to support new hardware
>> with their existing stable server branch.
>
> I do not see the point still.
>
> This will catch no ABI issues at all as it uses nothing.

for me, that's not the point of the merge. my motivation is to reduce 
the time spent on some uncommonly used drivers. these drivers see little 
updates past the ABI fixes but still have users. by merging them into 
the server, the ABI ifdefs will go away, the code will be cleaner, time 
spent updating them goes down. further down the road, the drivers could 
likely share common code paths that are essentially copy/paste now 
between the trees anyway. not sure that'll happen anytime soon.

Cheers,
   Peter