modular -> monolithic

George Michaelson ggm at pobox.com
Sun Jan 20 16:47:13 PST 2008


I have really only twiddled with Xorg as an early-adopter (l)user,  
hassling developers. But I have looked at and built code
off GIT as well as packaged state.

I believe that the cost to the BSD camp in terms of re-factoring their  
packaging model to take account of modular server build, and  
disaggregated drivers has now been 'amortized' (for want of a better  
word) and the benefits are coming in.

I can't speak for other distributions/OS but I suspect the same is  
true. 1-2 years of painful integration is now either complete
or nearly so. A litany of documentation and supporting activity is now  
built around things as they are.

To take the step of walking backwards into monolithic build, at this  
point, would make quite a lot of people in your userbase very unhappy  
(I believe). Do you really want to "just do it" this time? RIght now?

If its true that ABI coherence is being lost, I think that while for  
developers, there is a higher pain factor on policing it as things  
stand, this puts the pain where it belongs: with the people rolling  
incompatible changes.

If you do move back to monolithic state for the server, please be  
mindful of selling it very very carefully.

-George



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