intel driver will only compile with gcc

[Egbert Eich]

Diego Calleja writes:
 > El Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:53:10 -0400 (EDT), Thomas Dickey <dickey at his.com> escribió:
 > 
 > > yes (and you can selectively lock out undesirable developers by making
 > > the threshold too high).
 > 
 > Requiring a compiler that supports named initializers is not exactly what
 > I'd call "making the threshold too high". I'm rather surprised that there're
 > people ranting about it.

This seems to be missing the point.
Some paradigms seem to have changed in X.Org development
around the time the autotooling and modularization effords 
have taken place:
Since then the focus has been forward looking: towards new
systems with new hardware and new operating systems.
One needs a certain recent version of autotools, a recent
compiler toolchain and a number of libraries in an up-to-date
version.
The question about 'maintenance' of existing systems has
largely been brushed away for convenince and simplicity reasons:
open source developers don't like to be bothered with 'looking
backwards' and accomodating systems that don't provide the latest
comfort.
The argument has always been, that 'legacy' systems will continue
to build X in the version that was released when those systems
were new.

This topic arouse around the Xorg Xserver and its drivers.
People have been questioning if it's at all possible to run
such 'legacy' systems on recent hardware as such hardware
seems to require funtionalities in the kernel not provided
by older systems.
This may be true, still I'm surprised that the issue didn't
arise around components that are independent of the hardware
like 'vitrual Xserver' like Xephyr or Xdmx or the libraries.
- It seems to be conceivable that users may want to take 
  advantage of the features of these servers (which may not 
  even have existed at the time their system was released).
- It's also conceivable that users may need to update libraries 
  we ship to be able to install a recent toolkit chain on top.

However even if we consider the Xorg server and its drivers: 
Even Linux vendors begin to learn that products for the 
enterprise market need to have maintenance cycles of 5 to 
7 years. Their customers may expect to be able to roll out 
new hardware with the existing and tested system during 
this period. 
Thus avoiding features that may cause backward portabilitiy 
issues may create a little higher burdeon now but avoid a
lot of pain later.
And things that presently make the lives of those who maintain
'fringe' OSes miserable may haunt a lot bigger crowd in the
future.

Cheers,
	Egbert.