Xserver driver merging pros & cons

[Thierry Vignaud]

2011/9/15 Arkadiusz Miśkiewicz <arekm at maven.pl>:
> 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.

As a mandriva/mageia packager, I concur.
Packaging/maintainer X11 is so much easier since it's been modularized.

> 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).

Indeed in the old days, the 45mb tarballs were painful to maintain (on
the distro side)

what's more some distro will be stuck with some older x11-server due
to proprietary
globs not always being updated fast for new server ABIS whereas at the same
time they would love to have the latest ATI/nouveau/intel drivers to support
the latest HW.

OK we shouldn't care but the reality is that it does matter for part
of our end users :-(

Of coure, the remerging is limited but I would still favor releasing the server
and the drivers separately