Re: the removal of Packard

On Fri, Mar 21, 2003 at 10:54:57PM +0100, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> Are you aware that
> the DRM is trying to share code between different OSs for example,
> possibly with different standards?

Yes.  And I see how badly it's done. Take a look at XFS which is a
project I work on during daytime and see how it's written for IRIX
APIs and works for Linux nicely without beeing as horribly ugly
as drm.

But it's not just the ugly code, drm has lots of other issues like
silent changes of ioctl ABIs between XFree releases, and very often
there seems to be a lack of understanding the Linux APIs (e.g.
many driver oopsed for a while because they hadn't the unlock_page
prototype and thus got the calling convetion wrong, it opencoded
some kernel functionality I don't remember anymore and thus broke
when the implementation was changed, etc..)

Another very bad thing about the DRI kernel code is the CVS menality.
If the DRI folks would submit one patch for a change thos things could
be fixed a lot easier (and earlier!) instead of the big merges happening
from time to time.

> I find it funny that I rarely if ever see these enhancements on the
> dri-devel list, where the DRM maintainers are.

This ios mostly fixes.  Look into -ac or Red Hat's kernel tree to
find them.