modular -> monolithic

[David Nusinow]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 12:33:47PM +1000, Dave Airlie wrote:
> 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..

We've reached the point where there are clear trade-offs, and we'll have to
make a decision going forward. There is absolutely no argument for forcing
building the fonts and all the libraries to make a change to the server, so
people should stop saying that they want to go back to "monolithic" when
they don't really know what the monolith actually was.

The wins for shipping the drivers separately is that it becomes absolutely
trivial to deliver updates to users quickly. We've been able to get
snapshots of the various drivers to our users very quickly, and then get
feedback upstream all the driver developers because of this split. This
wouldn't go nearly as fast if we had to ship all the drivers with the
server. On the other hand, it's not clear to me how useful this is for the
driver developers, since you guys already have a very large TODO list.

For what it's worth, I'd support re-integrating the drivers with the
server. I have no time to do this now, nor really a major interest at this
stage, but I think many of us agree that it's the right direction to go.
What's critically missing from this discussion is someone who's willing to
stand up publicly and say "I'm going to do this, I'll let you guys know
when I have a git tree for you to look at." Without this, all this
discussion is just an exercise in wankery.

 - David Nusinow