Modular X.org and the Unichrome forks.

[Alan Cox]

On Iau, 2005-12-22 at 16:51 +0100, Luc Verhaegen wrote:
> For any modesetter worth his salts VBE is unacceptable.

So are reverts, so is dropping support because groups of developers
can't agree. Shall I fork the radeon driver for a laugh and then demand
X.org drops it because there are two versions. Thats not really any
crazier than your claims, just a bit more obviously showing the problem.

> What has happened on the panel front ever since VBE was added? Has there 
> been any change openchrome.org side since? No. VBE is the easy way out, 
> it is used to cover up that what people are unable to fix.

Which is what users of that hardware would prefer. VBE in the via driver
is pretty nasty but it works. 

> So why have i been unable to clean up the panel code then? The reason is 
> hardware. And hardware was the major reason for unichrome.sf.net 
> breaking up.

So if the output abstraction is so clean why not leave just the panels
on VBE mode setting for now and have VBE as an output abstraction ?

> As for XvMC, you'll see that most people can't be bothered with it. Most 
> people who buy IGP graphics just want their desktop to show up on 
> whatever screen they use. But those people also barely ever make noise,

There I must disagree. I know a lot of CLE266 users who are heavy users
of the Xvmc layer. Its the only way to do digital TV with the standard
digital TV cards and a CPU that slow. Thats the classic use of these
little boxes in a graphical environment.

> In the past 2.5years, i have learnt that good code and vision get you 
> nowhere. It more and more seems that free software is only about 
> money and politics.

Ask Keith Packard about Cairo. There is more to getting something done
than just producing code that works for some cases and not others. I
have the same problem in the kernel right now too. I've ripped out
drivers/ide and replaced most of it with new cleaner better drivers
using libata. Great, wonderful but quite rightly Linus won't rip out the
old drivers until I support everything the old ones do and its all
tested.

Why - because Linus also cares about the users and about a stable path
from A to B even if the road between them is longer as a result.

> I was hoping that my previous mail would take politics out of this 
> equation. Making it code against money.

That would be an even sillier position to take. Money generally sits on
the side of not changing things. Money tends to go "Does it still work
like it did last year, yep, fine who cares about cleanness".

Alan