stripping off "xf86-*-" from drivers
Rémi Cardona
remi at gentoo.org
Sun Jan 20 05:24:39 PST 2008
Lukas Hejtmanek a écrit :
> What makes you think that non modular drivers will be synced with X server
> changes? It is up to maintainers to watch X server changes and make patches as
> appropriate.
In Kernel Land (tm), if you modify a subsystem (say the USB one), you
get to fix all the bundled drivers before Linus et al. accept your
patch. Of course, that doesn't guarantee that the driver still works as
intended, but that at least it builds.
It's much easier to fix something that builds and runs.
> Yes, I know that current tree of X server and drivers does not build. But
> I don't care. And I even do not know why I should build all the drivers if
> I do not need them.
Again, in Kernel Land (tm) you have a .config file for such purpose. In
xorg-server, one could easily imagine a default configure.ac where
_none_ of the bundled drivers are built, but which could easily allow
you to build one or more drivers on their own.
GStreamer does this as well, they have a few tarballs (-base, -good,
-ugly, -bad) and each configure script allows you to build and install
only one plugin.
> Besides, non modular X server still does not solve problem with e.g. synaptics
> driver that is no more maintained and it is not a part of the tree. But almost
> all laptops use it todays.
Again, in Kernel Land (tm) some drivers are barely modified and may look
unmaintained: think of the PCI bus driver, the floppy driver, or the
serial line drivers. Those only change when the kernel's internal API
changes, which is linked to my first explanation above.
Cheers,
Rémi
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