stripping off "xf86-*-" from drivers

[David Miller]

From: Matthieu Herrb <matthieu.herrb at laas.fr>
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2008 07:59:46 +0100

> I meet people who pester against the constant break in Linux drivers
> quite often. Especially in the domain of embedded systems, many
> projects use older versions of the kernel or glibc and are really
> concerned by the difficulty for their projects to move forward,
> given the huge amount of incompatible changes they have to deal
> with.

It might be constructive to investigate why it is that the embedded
folks have this issue with "keeping up with the Jones's" in the
kernel.

You might actually find that the real issue is that they make zero
real effort to merge their work upstream even if they opensource
everything they write for the kernel.

So instead of having the community help maintain their stuff alongside
them, making going to future versions next to painless, they instead
bear the brunt of all the work and pain assosciated with such.

It isn't because interfaces are breaking all the time.

If they merged their stuff upstream, all the little worker ants
watching over the tree for build regressions would fix things up for
them, gradually, as interface changes go into upstream.

This is purely the reason for their pain.  Merging their stuff
upstream solves the update issue in two dimensions: 1) it offshores
the work of ABI updates to the upstream folks making those ABI changes
and 2) the update work is done smoothly, gradually, over time instead
of all at once.

Yes, if you try to go from something like 2.6.18 to 2.6.24 all in one
go you will have to make mountains of difficult changes to your
drivers.  That's why you shouldn't approach the problem in that way.