Re: Some perspective from the cheap seats...

On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Kendall Bennett wrote:

> "David Wexelblat" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > - I believe we do need more committer access. Not open access, but more
> > committer access. Mostly to reduce load on the people who are currently
> > responsible. I believe this is already in progress.
> 
> On of the key issues that I see at work here, is something I brought up 
> quite a few years ago now. XFree86 desperately needs a suite of 
> conformance tests that can be used to validate that a driver module is 
> correct and the binary interfaces are functioning properly. The loadable 
> module system is a step in the right direction, but simply compiling all 
> the modules and releasing them as a single lump for every XFree86 version 
> is inviting trouble. Unless someone has a change to sit down and 
> physically test the driver modules on all 'supported' hardware, there is 
> a very good chance that things will break.

   The xtest suite gives the driver a pretty good workout, at
least as far as rendering goes.

   A test suite directed more towards driver testing would be good,
however, this is a matter of resources.  Who is going to write such
a thing?  My todo list is long enough already.


			Mark.


> 
> Which brings me to the point about committer access. IMHO the XFree86 BOD 
> and Core Team have nightmares about driver bugs due to this exact reason. 
> Someone needs to police changes made to device driver code to ensure 
> things are *working*, when they are comitted to the XFree86 code tree. 
> Keeping the list closed helps to maintain a reasonable amount of quality, 
> but it means things move *very* slowly. 
> 
> If XFree86 does open up access to more committers (regardless of whether 
> it is fully open or just signing up 10-20 more active committers), 
> something needs to be done to ensure that people committing the code 
> changes can verify things are correct. More importantly those tools 
> should be available to the developers actually working on the drivers, so 
> they can ensure their work is correct before sending it to the committer.
> 
> But, this is just the way I feel. I said this years ago on the XFree86 
> developer lists, but no-one really listened to me. As Linus says, actions 
> speak louder than words, and for the last few years myself and my company 
> has been implementing exactly what I have spoken about above. SciTech 
> SNAP drivers are binary portable modules, but we have also build complete 
> conformance test suites to ensure the compatibility and integrity of the 
> drivers we build. IBM licensed this technology 3 years ago to solve 
> theirOS/2 display driver compatibility problems, and we are nearly done 
> porting the technology to the Linux platform. We should be going to beta 
> in the next week or so for our SNAP Graphics for Linux (XFree86 4.x 
> module based), so maybe then people will understand what I was trying to 
> get at all those years ago.
> 
> > On The Future Of X
> > ------------------
> > A number of people has questioned the relevence of X in general. To be
> > perfectly honest, I'm one of them. I've even pissed off Keith and many
> > others on the Core Team by pointing out that X is obsolescent. I've been
> > working in the Windows world for years now, and client-server display
> > systems are utterly irrelvent to the majority of real-world computer users.
> > X needs to be replaced by a direct-rendered model, on which a
> > backwards-compatible X server can be reasonably trivially implemented.
> 
> Yes, I agree entirely with that. Network transparency is nice sometimes, 
> but not really essential for the day to day use of desktop computing. The 
> first step IMHO is to simply implement a 2D direct rendering system to 
> increase performance. Whether X needs to go or whether it can be 
> reinvented to support 2D direct rendering is a different question.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> ---
> Kendall Bennett
> Chief Executive Officer
> SciTech Software, Inc.
> Phone: (530) 894 8400
> http://www.scitechsoft.com
> 
> ~ SciTech SNAP - The future of device driver technology! ~
> 
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