start of some pci cleanups

Jesse Barnes jbarnes at virtuousgeek.org
Mon Jul 25 12:15:44 PDT 2005


On Monday, July 25, 2005 12:08 pm, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> As noted elsewhere, it breaks binary compatibility, and we're past
> the point in the Xorg 6.9/7.0 release cycle where we want to do that
> unless absolutely required.   And then once 7.0 is released, breaking
> it will become much harder since you'll have to coordinate individual
> releases of the Xorg server and all the separate drivers.

As you say, breaking it later becomes even more difficult than breaking 
it now, and it's probably better to break a large chunk at once than 
breaking it a little every release, don't you think?

Also, this change breaks it in a very obvious way--old code won't 
compile after this change goes in (which will help avoid subtle runtime 
bugs) and is *very* easy to fix back up.

> Is there any way this could be redone in a binary compatible fashion?
> For instance, leave the old functions, but tell everyone they are
> deprecated and add new functions with the domain arguments they
> should use instead?   The old functions could even simply be wrappers
> around the new that call the new ones with a domain of 0 or -1 or
> something. (For the ones called from drivers - those internal to the
> Xorg server aren't as important to preserve.)

That's a possibility, but then we're stuck with code like this forever 
as it's becoming very difficult to make large changes *without* 
breaking compatibility.

If vendors would just submit their drivers with an open source license 
to the tree, we could fix them all up at once when changes like this 
were made...

Jesse



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