Modularization mailing list and initial strawman proposal

[Kevin E Martin]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 03:42:23PM -0500, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 21:39 +0100, Roland Mainz wrote:
> > Kevin E Martin wrote:
> > 
> > >    The XFree86 drivers module: xfree86-driver
> > 
> > Why can't it be named "drivers" (yes, I know, "Xfree86" should be
> > referenced but that can be done in the docs) ? I don't like to have
> > giant-overlong-pathnames 
> 
> xfree86-driver/xxx is shorter than
> xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/drivers/xxx.
> 
> > and the drivers/ subdir will likely host other kinds of drivers like 
> > the kdrive, Sun DDX or the Xprint ones...
> 
> My understanding is this isn't about a subdir but a separate module, so
> such drivers should be in another module I think.

I've been thinking about this over the weekend, and talked with Keith
about it briefly as well before he left on vacation.

There are likely to be additional drivers over time, and we should
figure out how to incorporate them into the modular tree.  Let's take an
XAA and a kdrive based MGA driver as examples.  We currently have
specified xfree86-driver and if we created another module for kdrive
called kdrive-driver, then those modules could contain the MGA drivers
as follows:

    xfree86-driver/mga
    kdrive-driver/mga

The problem here is that there are two packages named the same, i.e.,
mga, and we should give people a way to distinguish them.  So, we could
do something like the following:

    xfree86-driver/xaa-mga
    kdrive-driver/kaa-mga

but that seems a bit redundant.  We could also go with just "driver" as
the module name, and have a directory hierarchy.  For example:

    driver/xaa/mga
    driver/kaa/mga

Again, that suffers from the problem of two packages being named the
same.  The next possibility is:

    driver/xaa-mga
    driver/kaa-mga

Of the possibilities above, I prefer this solution, since the directory
names are descriptive, unique and would correspond to the package names,
and the directory structure is flat (which both Keith and I liked).

Comments and/or suggestions?  Other possibilities?

Thanks,
Kevin