Driver development vs X development

  I would like to see better handling of adding new drivers and
bugfixing existing drivers.  It's unclear to me whether it would be
better to try and split driver and server development more, or release
more often, but I think many of the benefits of a modular server
architecture are lost when we see users not getting bugfixes for drivers
until the next major release.

  I was quite disturbed by this recent thread:

  http://www.mail-archive.com/devel%40xfree86.org/msg00846.html

  Also, there are many driver bugfixes and experimental driver
development that take a long time to get into the X distribution.  If
there is an experimental branch of a driver, why not ship both?

  http://www.winischhofer.net/linuxsis630.shtml
  http://gatos.sourceforge.net/

  One final note about drivers, video projects (such as xine, mplayer,
avifile) are doing their own driver architectures, partly because of the
slow X development cycles (see vidix/*_vid/...).  Maybe having driver
code more independent of X development would be enough to see some of
this advanced and experimental driver code be shared with code intended
for use inside the X server.

-- 
Billy Biggs
[email protected]