Xserver driver merging pros & cons

Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz arekm at maven.pl
Thu Sep 15 12:45:52 PDT 2011


On Thursday 15 of September 2011, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> At XDC this week we discussed merging drivers back into the server
> tree.  One thing I found frustrating about the discussion was that we
> didn't have a whiteboard nor a list of the pros & cons of such a
> change.  So I'd like to capture that here (from memory) to let us
> continue the discussion about whether it's worth it or not.

From distro package maintainer point of view I _love_ split drivers. It's so 
much easier to packages these, rebuild when needed (one faulty, not building, 
driver doesn't stop whole build process), easier to patch and backport fixes.

Monolitic thing causes one build problem to stop building the whole thing. 
Also with monolitic you need to find out which files are for which package (in 
case if you want to split that into subpackages on rpm spec level for 
example).

-- 
Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz        PLD/Linux Team
arekm / maven.pl            http://ftp.pld-linux.org/


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