Glucose status/instructions request, (and notes on stale branches)

[Alan Hourihane]

On Thu, 2007-10-18 at 18:28 -0700, Jesse Barnes wrote:
> On Thursday, October 18, 2007, Alan Hourihane wrote:
> > > Anyone is welcome to pull from the glucose branch if they like;
> > > pulling from 'not master' will give them a good idea of what to
> > > expect in terms of stability.
> >
> > What I'm also concerned about is what else you veto in favour of your
> > terms. Where does that kind of argument end ?
> 
> I think there are a few technical reasons that would argue against 
> adding another accel architecture to the driver.  One of the main 
> problems we have now is that neither of the existing architectures work 
> correctly in all situations, and having to maintain both adds to our 
> workload a bit.  So if it were up to me, I'd like to see just one, 
> solid accel API, in the Intel driver at least, at a time.
> 
> Fortunately, the driver side of glucose seems fairly simple, so we 
> should have lots of code to delete if it hits master, and I think 
> you're right to wait until you have the major issues addressed before 
> trying to push it.  On the other hand, a branch containing just the 
> glucose stuff should be easy to keep up to date until the server and 
> other pieces are ready, so it seems like it wouldn't be much trouble to 
> keep it out of master for now (again I'm just thinking of the driver 
> tree).  The alternative would be for the next Intel driver release 
> manager (which looks to be me after Kyle does his point release) to 
> create a separate branch with just the features we'd like to see 
> supported in the next release, but it would be nice if we could avoid 
> that.  After all, branches are for experimental features and master 
> should be for stuff that's done.  As it stands we have too many bugs 
> and partially supported features in master...

You say above Jesse, that you are just thinking about the driver. So
just merging the main glucose code into xserver master - you'd be happy
with ?

That would at least give me the option to use glucose in other drivers. 

It would also bring Xgl up-to-date too.

> Any other ideas?  I'm just afraid of going any further down the slippery 
> slope of adding "just one more config option" to the driver before it's 
> ready or w/o removing others at the same time to keep things simple.

Mmm. It's not really a new option, we hook on the existing AccelMethod
option. But I hasten to add that you added the FBC option recently :-)

Alan.