modular -> monolithic

[Egbert Eich]

Russell Shaw writes:
 > Egbert Eich wrote:
 > 
 > What is an out-of-band release?
 > 
 > In the monolithic model, drivers can still be released separately to X because
 > they're plugins that can be installed into users systems without recompiling.
 > 

Russell, I'm aware that driver are loadable binary modules - they have been
since the year 2000 - and longer in the XFree86 3.99 development tree.
 
I'm talking about source code releases - not a binary blop that you pull out
of a build.
The driver maintainer does a source release by doing some constancy checks, 
tagging it in the SCM, create a tarball (containing the version number in 
the name), calculate an md5, push the tarball onto a public server and make 
an annoucement (with a signed email containing the md5 sum).
This way whoever is interested can just get the driver sources and compile
them  for the Xserver he is using - preferrably the last stable released
version.
How do you make this work when the maintainer can no create a separate tar
ball but just bumps a version number in come configure.ac file in git HEAD?

Do you expect the user to install a possibly unstable server from git HEAD 
because he wants to use the released driver?

Soon we will hear people complain: "I just want to exchange the driver,
why do I have to get the entire server?"
Also, how do you want to build the driver for a different server when
there is no separate build environment any more?
And if we want to keep the separate build environment and make the driver
self contained - where is the advantage?


 > Maybe some other parts of X could be made modules too.

?! Have you ever looked at it? They are.

Cheers,
	Egbert.