driver configuration (was: News ATI drivers)

[Dominique Dumont]

pcpa at mandriva.com.br writes:
> Several years ago, when I worked on xf86cfg (and used to work full
> time on X for Conectiva for some time), I did a scratch of what
> could become a tool for quality control and possibly "driver
> certification" builtin in xf86cfg. I believe that code doesn't even
> compile anymore.

I'm working on a similar approach with config-model and its associated
Xorg model (check http://config-model.wiki.sourceforge.net/), but it's
not ready for prime time (I've some issues to work out on config-model
core itself before resuming work on the Xorg model).

The main advantage of config-model is that any update of the model
description is immediately available in the GUI.

> My idea was to have driver options documentation in the source code,
> from where it could be extracted during the build for extra
> documentation (the Options file is severily outdated, but was a
> start...).

I use this kind of trick to extract keyboard option information to
create a configuration model for keyboard so all configuration
possibilities are offered to the end user. 

> I believe that code can be extracted from the now xorgcfg, to a
> separate tool, that would load the driver, wrap most of the X server
> calls etc, this to make sure the driver is sane. 

May be we could compare our notes to see if we can have a match
between my pure model approach and your code. 

> And also hopefuly offer more options to the developer.  There are
> already OpenGL and "generic" tools to test conformance (the "xtest
> suite" among others). Maybe this can be reworked again. Well, I did
> that without any plan, just started coding. This could be an
> interesting project, to hopefully create a testing/certification
> system that would give a better experience to the "end user", and
> (cross fingers :-) guarantee an stable/reliable X, because
> developers would notice problems before releases/etc. 

Interesting ideas. But shouldn't this be clearly separated from a
configuration tool ?

Cheers