Xserver driver merging pros & cons

Keith Packard keithp at keithp.com
Sat Sep 17 10:24:21 PDT 2011


On Sat, 17 Sep 2011 13:04:13 +0200, Matthieu Herrb <matthieu.herrb at laas.fr> wrote:

>    3) makes it harder to maintain out of tree drivers, since API
>       breaks are not going to be documented anymore. 
>       If old pre-kms code start to be removed, the people still
>       depending on them will need a forked X xserver, which is not a
>       good idea at all. 

Our current ABI change process is to find out when someone tries to run
a driver which hasn't been recompiled against the development
server. For changes which don't affect the API, that's often been Aaron
Plattner, who maintains an out-of-tree driver.

The ABI numbers live in a 16-bit space, and we've only used a tiny
portion. I think we should feel fairly free to bump the ABI number
anytime something changes, and not just once per server release.

-- 
keith.packard at intel.com
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