stripping off "xf86-*-" from drivers

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Matthieu Herrb wrote:

>> It may seem counter-intuitive, but Linux breaks its ABI as
>> many times as the developers see fit, and *therefore* it
>> comes with the largest driver base of any existing OS.
> 
> Do you have specific data to show that there's a correlation between the
> two ?
> 
> I'm not convinced at all.

People seem to think that Linux can afford a have its
current development model because it's so popular, when
very clearly it has to be the other way around: Linux
became popular thanks to its unique development model.

And if you're unconvinced, notice how, by almost any kind
of metric you can come up with, the linux kernel is by far
the largest and fastest growing open source project that
ever existed.

You may find an interesting thread in the gcc mailing list
where some developer claimed that gcc was a larger project
than the kernel, but it turned out to be untrue in any
possible way they tried to measure.  It did not help that
gcc had 10 more years to gather code and contributors.


> 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.

I've done quite some work in the embedded Linux world, and
I think I know why embedded projects tend to lag behind so
much.

It's because they're very frequently done by hardware
and software engineer with very little Linux experience,
who generally have never before contributed a single patch
to any open source project.

These developers initially think they can save time by
freezing the toolchain, kernel and OS platform forever
and doing all sort of unclean hacks to meet their
requirements.

After a couple of years they usually learn their lesson,
but guess what?  It's too late to undo the damage and
they're stuck with a totally unmaintainable in-house
fork of an entire Linux distribution.  Of course at this
point they blame Linux and its ever changing code.


> Incompatible changes from time to time are still ok but not if they can
> be avoided at a reasonable cost. And they should be clearly documented
> and announced in advance.

I'm sure people on this list do not make big API breakage
reworks just for the sake of it.  Quite the contrary, actually.

Xorg is by far one of the most conservative projects I've ever
approached.  It was the last to convert to ANSI C, and it's
one of the few still encumbered with crappy data types and
#ifdefs for platforms that nobody remembers what they looked
like :-)

-- 
 \___/
 |___|   Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \___\  One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/