Re: New proposed DRM interface design

From: Keith Whitwell
Date: Sat Sep 04 2004 - 07:09:34 EST


Dave Jones wrote:

There's already a per-distro mechanism to make all this all nice and
transparent to end-users. In Fedora, we even have 3 (apt-get/yum/up2date).
The problem is when 3rd parties like the DRI project expect users not to
use the tools they are familiar with, and expect them to run off to fetch
bits from websites and replace random bits of their system.

Who do you think gets the support calls and blame when the X server breaks
because the user bodged it ?

I think they get shared out pretty evenly between dri-users and your lot. We all agree there's a problem, I'm happy to do what it takes to move towards a solution.

In the past, redhat & other vendors have only tracked XFree86 release cycles, which weren't exactly timely, and in the most recent instance, didn't even include an up-to-date DRI. Although we've mainly been bitching about the kernel, the real drag has been userspace updates.

So, we are coming out of a period of history where it was extremely difficult to get our drivers to users through the 'official' channels - to the extent that many people have given up on the possibility of them working properly. Maybe things will improve now.

Are you suggesting for instance, that RedHat might pick up individual drivers out of Xorg or better still Mesa, rather than waiting for a full stable release? That would probably be the biggest help - by comparison kernel releases are very frequent.

Keith

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/