CVS Update: xc (branch: trunk)

[Mike A. Harris]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Felix Kühling wrote:

>Am Dienstag, den 01.02.2005, 00:33 -0500 schrieb Mike A. Harris:
>> On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Felix Kuehling wrote:
>> 
>> Why not use "BusType" instead of "ForcePCIMode", as the former 
>> seems to be more standardized, and other drivers have been 
>> changed to use BusType in the past, which is also more generic.
>
>Troll's answer: There will never be PCI-Express Savages. ;-)
>
>Seriously, the option has nothing to do with the real bus type. It is
>really intended for debugging and for testing PCI stuff on AGP hardware.
>I think this option name makes this more clear than BusType.

There may or may not ever be PCI-E Savages, but that's kindof 
besides the point.  The Radeon (and other?) drivers used to have 
a "ForcePCIMode" option used for the exact same purpose that 
you're indicating you're using it for, and it was renamed to be 
BusType in newer radeon driver code to be consistent with other 
drivers and to generically handle different bustypes.

When adding new options to drivers, it is a good idea to see if 
there is already a common option used in others, and aim for 
consistency.  It really sucks if someone adds a config option and 
then later renames it to something more sensible and/or generic, 
because it breaks user's deployed X server configuration when 
they upgrade to a new OS release.

The result of this is potentially tonnes of end user bug reports 
unless the older option is retained for backward compatibility 
with what it was called before.

Just some thoughts...

-- 
Mike A. Harris, Systems Engineer - X11 Development team, Red Hat Canada, Ltd.

IT executives rate Red Hat #1 for value:  http://www.redhat.com/promo/vendor