Re: Driver development vs X development

David Dawes wrote:
> 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.

There's a straightforward way to fix this -- make the standard XFree86 drivers 
build against the SDK by default.  Any breakage will be immediately obvious.

Keith