[RFC] merged void driver

[Peter Hutterer]

On 6/11/10 19:08 , Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 06, 2010 at 11:17:26AM +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
>> On 6/11/10 24:45 , Luc Verhaegen wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>
> How often do you intend to change the API in a way that even the void
> driver needs to be adjusted?

the api for input drivers is quite limited. we have a few structs, but 
most importantly a few calls to initialize various bits of the device 
(does it have buttons, does it have axes, etc.).
Over the last couple of server releases, those calls have changed 
frequently. the addition of button/axis labels, removal of per-driver 
motion history, now the per-axis valuator mode. in ABI 12 the PreInit 
calls have changed, requiring significant rewrites.

all that can be handled by ifdefs and that's what we do now but it is 
getting towards a big mess.  the simple solution is to ditch support for 
older X servers (I don't think anyone really cares about void supporting 
the last 3 server releases) but exactly at that point it starts making 
sense merging the drivers into the server.

Cheers,
   Peter