Modular X.org and the Unichrome forks.

[Alan Cox]

On Iau, 2005-12-22 at 07:06 -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> It sounds like you're saying this with absolutely no experience of
> modular X and how easy it is to just build another driver.

You think most users are even programmers ? The result of removing the
driver would be that every vendor puts it back. At which point the
vendors might as well keep a forked X.org tree of X.org +
destupidifcation.

That screws developers because patches will inevitably 'get lost' on
their way back to the X.org tree and people will make changes dependant
on vendor trees. Worst case the ABI goes incompatible and we all lose.

This has happened historically with XFree86, for obvious reasons, where
critical and rather useful fixes bounced around between vendors rpm
packages and if you built generic XFree86 some stuff plain didnt work.

Modular means that Luc can maintain his driver seperately and people can
easily try it. Thats great - its really good that people can try
alternatives and hopefully knock remaining bugs out. In the mean time
X.org needs to ship a driver, and the one with the least regressions is
the logical conservative choice until the developers figure out what
they are doing.

I did the original cleanup and merge of the via driver. All the parties
keeping differing via trees helped, and clearly from the patches none of
you are stupid so please figure out some kind of long term plan to sort
it out ?

Alan