stripping off "xf86-*-" from drivers

[Stephane Marchesin]

On 1/24/08, Dave Airlie <airlied at gmail.com> wrote:

> b) Fedora has a stated goal of not shipping external kernel modules,
> unless they are on their way towards the upstream kernel or are
> special like Xen.
> How do I pick a version of nouveau to ship? I pick 0.0.10 for kernel
> 2.6.22-15, and you release 0.0.11 and I package that with 2.6.22-35,
> now a user has other problems with -35,
> (They have userspace 0.0.11 installed), and the boot back to -15 and
> get no graphics? I don't think that is acceptable.
> The other option is to ship both kernel modules with different names
> nouveau0010 and nouveau0011 again stupidity beyond belief.
> Some distros do this for nvidia already (nvidia, nvidia-old,
> nvidia-new, nvidia-new-new, nvidia-for-eva)
>

This is exactly what I wanted to show.

Distros (not aimed at you specifically, all distros have some kind of
repos for that) are ready to invest time into doing exactly this
complex packaging scheme for binary blobs, but do not want to invest
the same effort into packaging open source drivers. Again, things seem
backwards to me.

So in short :
- binary driver devs don't have to handle binary compatibility between
their 3 modules (DRI/DRM/DDX) but still people keep packaging those
modules.
- open source driver devs are supposed to handle that compatibility
fine in all directions (it's a 3-way game remember).

This is more than a little disturbing to me, why don't we make our own
life easier instead ?

Stephane