modular -> monolithic

[Matthieu Herrb]

Bernardo Innocenti wrote:
> To summarize, it seems there's interest in merging the
> drivers back into the server tree.
> 

No don't do that.

Beeing able to build drivers outside of the X server was one of design
goals even for XFree86 4.x. This is really something we need for various
reasons that I can remind if necessary.

This has of course some constraints. The more proeminent one is that
care should be taken to keep the interfaces between the X server and the
drivers as stable as possible, and to provide some level of backward
compatibility when this interface changes.

This rule has been violated too often in the past hurting all 3rd party
 module maintainers. But with ajax's work to clean up the interface, we
should be able to do less mistakes like this from now.

Unfortunatly I've not followed the XACE integration very closely, so I
missed the incompatibilities that it introduces. Ihmo if it was known
from the work in the branch that merging it would break something, the
branch shouldn't have been merged before either a good solution to keep
backward compat could be found or a clear announcement of the changes
that need to be done has be sent to 3rd party in advance to leave them a
reasonable time to update their code.

Last point, one of the goals of the modularization effort was to make it
possible to contribute to X.Org without having to build the whole tree.
This is one very important one. Too many people struggle to build the
whole X.Org without a real need for it. But without stable interfaces,
it will never be possible to do any development on a system that is not
shipping bleeding edge versions of all packages.
--
Matthieu Herrb