Re: Driver development vs X development

On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 10:47:10AM +0100, Egbert Eich wrote:
>There are plans to allow driver release independently from the 
>X release. I'm going to change the location of the driver 
>directories to implement this more easily. We also need to have
>an SDK just for driver development as we did with 3.x.

I don't think it's necessary to change the driver directory location
in order to allow drivers to be distributed independently (the
Linux and FreeBSD kernels didn't do anything like this, and it's
possible to build driver modules outside of a full kernel build in
both of those cases).  There just needs to be an SDK type of thing
so that they *can* be built and distributed standalone outside of
the regular source tree structure.  The way CVS works, it isn't
even necessary to do this to allow easy checkout of just individual
drivers (that's what CVS modules are for).

David Bateman did some work on an SDK for 4.x a long time ago.
Unfortunately it was constantly getting broken because nobody else
seemed to care enough about it to take it into account when adding
new stuff.

David
-- 
David Dawes
Release Engineer/Architect                      The XFree86 Project
www.XFree86.org/~dawes