Xserver driver merging pros & cons

[Rémi Cardona]

Le 15/09/2011 17:45, Jesse Barnes a écrit :
> 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.

With my (dusty) Gentoo hat on, our needs as a source distro are quite 
simple:

if we could influence any decision, we'd like to be able to build the 
server and drivers separately. In other words, a user installing (and 
therefor *building*) a new driver shouldn't have to rebuild the server 
and all the driver s/he has already installed.

That being said, a server with merged drivers would still be an order of 
magnitude faster to build than the old XFree86 monolith (no docs, no 
libs, no static swrast, etc).

Speaking of mesa, the drivers are all already merged and none of our 
users have ever complained about that...

If those who actually work on the code base feel merging things would 
help them rock Xorg even further, I guess I'll do my best to support 
them in Gentoo.

Cheers,

Rémi