Modularization mailing list and initial strawman proposal

[Daniel Stone]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 03:15:51PM +0100, Jonas Gall wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Mar 2005 01:00:54 +1100, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
> > Because 'drivers' is a really bad name.
> > 
> > Drivers for what?
> 
> video, print, input, multimedia and every other loadable driver module.

I know that, and you know that, but it's not clear from the name.

> > Cars?  ALSA?  KDrive?  libX11's overengineered
> > localisation structure?
> 
> Stop the trolling. You and everyone else known what's in that CVS module.

Yes, I do, but is that a good reason to have a really unclear name?

> > Yes, but no code has yet been shown to this end, that I know of.  It has
> > also shown to be a very difficult problem -- looking at any application
> > that uses Xprint, the fundamental differences between display and print
> > drivers are exposed to the application. 
> 
> A working version has been demonstrated in oct 04 and the patches for
> that were made available in one of the Xprint list.

Interesting.  Is there a reason why these patches have never been
proposed to xorg@, or even talked about on this list before now, even
when discussions of it came up?  Maybe sending it in for public
review would be a good idea.  Roland, do you have any insight here?

> > I don't see how this could cleanly work in the server.
> 
> Works perfectly.
> Next question.

Works and 'works cleanly' are not necessarily two different things.

I don't know if you ever saw the architecture for ipchains, but it
was basically a staggering load of #ifdef's all through the IP stack,
with hardcoded calls into ipchains.  Now, ipchains worked.  But it
didn't work cleanly.

So, now we have netfilter, which hooks in at about four places in the
IP stack, and is totally generic between the iptables-based packet
filtering and mangling, and writing, say, a FreeS/WAN implementation
if you wanted to (it was proposed for a while).  It works, and it also
works cleanly.

That's the difference between the two, but I'm honestly not interested
in debating these sort of issues with hostile parties.
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