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    SubjectRe: [git pull] drm request 3
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    On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:46 AM,  <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
    > On Fri, Mar 05, 2010 at 06:04:34PM +0200, Daniel Stone wrote:
    >>
    >> So you're saying that there's no way to develop any reasonable body of
    >> code for the Linux kernel without committing to keeping your ABI
    >> absolutely rock-solid stable for eternity, no exceptions, ever? Cool,
    >> that worked really well for Xlib.
    >
    > No, that's not what people are saying.  What people are saying is,
    > "avoid flag days".  Deprecate things over a 6-12 month time period.
    > We have lots of really good interfaces for doing that.
    >
    > You say you don't want to do that?  Then keep it to your self and
    > don't get it dropped into popular distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu.
    > You want a larger pool of testers?  Great!  The price you need to pay
    > for that is to be able to do some kind of of ABI versioning so that
    > you don't have "drop dead flag days".
    >
    > If you don't want to be a good citizen, then prepared to have people
    > call you out for, well, not being a good OSS citizen.

    I was trying my hardest to not say anything, but...

    Nouveau isn't an official Xorg project. It hasn't been added to the
    jhbuild list for auto-checkout, it doesn't get tinderbox time
    (admittedly a function of being part of the jhbuild) and I don't think
    it's on the katamari list, so it's never been shipped as part of an
    Xorg release. It is only in mainline under the staging rules; drivers
    come and go from staging under fairly lax rules.

    Fedora ships this stuff because they're actively developing it and
    enjoy deploying half-broken things to users in the vain hope that it
    magically won't break. I can't count the number of kittens eaten by
    Fedora systems I've used. (It is kind of sad that Fedora's still the
    best distro about not deploying broken stuff but still remaining
    up-to-date.) Tellingly, it doesn't look like this interface change has
    been deployed to stable Fedora, just Rawhide.

    The Ubuntu people don't talk to us as much as they should. Seeing how
    badly they biffed Radeon and Intel KMS deployment, it's hard for me to
    believe that deploying Nouveau went smoothly. I don't have much more
    personal experience; my work computer has an HD 3450 in it now instead
    of the old GeForce, and that's my only Ubuntu box.

    If distros want to run weird experiments on their users, let them!
    Sure, sometimes bad things happen, but sometimes good things happen
    too. ConsoleKit, DeviceKit, HAL, NetworkManager, KMS, yaird, dracut,
    Plymouth, the list goes on and on.

    If the problem here is actually that a distro is deploying a staging
    driver and picking up the pieces themselves, then just say it. This
    whole thing with flag days, deprecation, interface changes, etc.
    hinges on the idea that the code being deprecated was stable, usable,
    and widely deployed, but it wasn't and isn't.

    That said... Code probably is moving too fast inside nouveau. There is
    a bit of a wall to go through to get new patches upstream, which one
    would hope would inspire some developer restraint. intel and radeon
    both still have most (if not all) of the legacy code needed by ancient
    userspaces, and both DDX drivers are doing multiple-branch releases to
    keep old userspace interfaces alive for people unable to update their
    kernels. It might be useful for the nouveau guys to really seriously
    consider code before it leaves their trees and enters mainline;
    writing code that you won't commit to is quite lame for the obvious
    reasons, but also for some unobvious reasons, e.g. it makes you look
    like you don't actually know what you're doing and would rather just
    keep reinventing wheels without justifying and testing your design
    choices. (This is also why I was not exactly pleased with the
    suggestion of retooling all of the r600 userspace over a change to the
    CS system; we just spent the better part of a year moving everything
    over to CS!)

    ~ C.

    --
    Only fools are easily impressed by what is only
    barely beyond their reach. ~ Unknown

    Corbin Simpson
    <MostAwesomeDude@gmail.com>
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