On Mon, 2011-03-14 at 10:06 -0700, Matt Turner wrote: > On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 4:52 PM, José Fonseca <jfons...@vmware.com> wrote: > > If we want a cleaner / more agile code base, then we could fork off the > > old mesa drivers which aren't being actively maintained/tested into a > > separate branch, put them in just-bugfixes/no-new-features life support > > mode; therefore allowing greater freedom to refactor support for the > > active/maintained drivers, without the hassle of updating old drivers > > and its associated risks. > > What drivers are you talking about?
I'm talking about drivers that: - have no fragment shader - haven't active maintainers Perhaps these: dri/tdfx dri/mga dri/i810 dri/sis dri/unichrome dri/mach64 dri/r128 dri/r200 dri/savage windows/icd windows/gldirect windows/gldirect/mesasw windows/gldirect/dx9 windows/gldirect/dx7 windows/gldirect/dx8 windows/gdi windows/fx I'm not sure about the status of these: - dri/radeon - dri/nouveau > A quick glance tells me that old drivers like tdfx and savage were > only modified 7 and 8 times respectively in 2010, so I don't see old > drivers slowing any development down. I see that as a clear indicative of trouble: - probably nobody is testing those drivers as we change Mesa common code - we can't remove old features from Mesa DDI because those drivers need it > What would splitting these drivers out of the Mesa codebase allow? > Intel's still using the classic infrastructure, so. Suppose we want to: - eliminate fixed function from Mesa DDI - replace Mesa IR and TGSI from Mesa classic driver interface and Gallium respectively, with GLSL2 IR. Is there point in writing a reverse shader -> fixed function for older drivers, or rewrite the shader translations for those drivers? Basically, I'm arguing that support for old fashioned hardware be done in a separate tree, that acts as a time vault. I think it is a disservice both for developers and users trying to cover for so many generations of hardware, some very different from anothers, in a single source tree. This is a mere suggestion -- I think we could continue the current approach of adding layers (some very old, others newer, with some doing the translation in between) indefinitely -- I'm simply arguing that it would be probably easier if we could shed out some of the legacy stuff and keep the code a bit leaner. Jose _______________________________________________ mesa-dev mailing list mesa-dev@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/mesa-dev
