Re: the removal of Packard

On Sat, Mar 22, 2003 at 12:31:21AM +0100, Michel Dänzer wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Well, do you think your rants are encouraging anyone to do better? I
> don't.

I have given up on DRM to be honest.  In 2000 when I still worked for
a Linux Vendor and thus touched DRM more often then now I never got
upstream feedback except for technical clearly wrong opposement to
the build system changes.

> > But it's not just the ugly code, drm has lots of other issues like
> > silent changes of ioctl ABIs between XFree releases, 
> 
> I'm not aware of this happening in a while except for a minor problem in
> the 4.2 i810 DRM which could be fixed after the fact. Were there others?

See Alan's post.

> Speaking for myself, I always appreciate being educated about such
> things, but I doubt ranting on random mailing lists serves this purpose.

You might start by looking at the #warnings Alan put into the drm code
in -ac.

> > This ios mostly fixes.  Look into -ac or Red Hat's kernel tree to
> > find them.
> 
> You're saying maintainers are supposed to collect fixes?

Yes.  Fixes (as opposed to new features) do happen in the kernel trees
and you have to follow them.  Just subscribe to the commits list
and grep for drm in your mail filter.