X server 1.10 development cycle

[Mart Raudsepp]

On Fri, 2010-09-10 at 11:41 -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> Merging Drivers:
> 
> I'm also still interested to hear how we can de-modularize the system
> to some extent where it would be useful. Merging the protocol headers
> into a single package would be a good step, but it would require
> someone to step up and offer to take charge of doing release
> management for the whole thing.
> 
> I think Peter Hutterer is almost convinced that bringing the input
> drivers into the server would help let us fix the API/ABI issues in
> that interface faster.
> 
> Video drivers seem a bit harder, they're much larger, of course, and
> we'd really need a dedicated 'subsystem maintainer' to make that work
> inside the server. For drivers using KMS, I think moving them into the
> core server would let us refactor them to eliminate the duplicate mode
> setting code.
> 
> Anyone want to volunteer to have "their" driver get merged into the
> server for 1.10?

I haven't heard any actual technical benefits in doing so, whereas there
are many drawbacks in doing so.
So I doubt any volunteering from the xf86-video-geode crowd, for
instance. We want to support installing a newer driver version against
older server versions, and that is quite easy to maintain if the driver
is separate - even across video ABI changes, making a recompile of
driver the only necessity.
In addition it would seem to make it considerably harder to test GIT
versions of the driver against the system installed xserver, and also
various other drawbacks (packaging, etc).

Where can I read why merging (video) drivers would be a good idea in any
form?


Regards,
Mart Raudsepp