Xserver driver merging pros & cons

[Jeremy Huddleston]

On Sep 15, 2011, at 2:45 PM, Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz wrote:

> 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.

I don't see how it is easier.  git-cherry-pick should do most of that for you just like it currently does.  You'd just be doing it in a clone of xorg-server rather than a clone of xf86-video-*

> Monolitic thing causes one build problem to stop building the whole thing. 

Hopefully integration will help find such build failures BEFORE they're pushed.  It also makes failure points more obvious on the tinderbox.

> 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).


I don't think that's a particularly persuasive argument.  Mask out /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers and /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input from installing with your master xorg-server package.  Each driver in each of those directories gets their own subpackage.  When new ones show up, they'll be excluded by your base exclusion rule until you create a new package.