modular -> monolithic

[Dave Airlie]

On Jan 21, 2008 10:47 AM, George Michaelson <ggm at pobox.com> wrote:
> 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?

The thing is modularity was about a whole lot more than
server/drivers, it was primarily about removing the libs fonts and
apps and Mesa builds from the server build, granted the drivers were
done at the time but this may have been a step too far, I can't see
rolling the drivers back into the server package being a major job for
any distro.. the big thing of going to modular for distros was
autotools and depend tree building..

Dave.