[PATCH 18/19] xfree86: Remove driver entity hooks and private

[Adam Jackson]

On Thu, 2014-10-02 at 16:25 -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> Adam Jackson <ajax at redhat.com> writes:
> 
> > Can we consider coming up with a heuristic for the oldest server version
> > that current git versions of drivers will continue to support?  The
> > amount of #ifdef in the drivers is getting a bit absurd, and it's a bit
> > disingenuous to pretend our support goes back as far as we currently let
> > build.
> 
> The question is back porting support for new hardware to old distros;
> that's generally easier done by taking the new driver and compiling it
> with the old X server bits than by back-porting hardware support into
> the old driver.

"The old X server" isn't a thing for me, anymore.  In RHEL6 we've been
doing rebases on even-numbered minor releases, I really never need to
build against a server that's more than ~18 months old.  And we're
likely to continue that pattern in RHEL7.

Admittedly, I'm not the only X server vendor in the world.  But the
amount of API-compat code in the drivers probably shouldn't increase
without bound.  The majority of our drivers don't really have
maintainers, so it'd be nice to have some consensus about how old of a
server is too old.

- ajax