Re: GGI might be the way...

On Sat, Mar 22, 2003 at 02:16:53PM -0800, David Jeske wrote:
> Since you're all considering how to take the next step with X/Xfree, I
> think you should consider absorbing and adopting GGI. Even if you have
> some political beef with GGI or it's implementation choices -- please
> consider the motivations below carefully. 

Umm, what's your point?  There is XGGI and everyone who wants can use
it.  It looks like most people prefer the Linux fbdev and XFree drivers,
though.  Your homework is to think about why this might be true :)

> 1) Third party driver distribution needs to be the norm, not an
>    afterthought. GGI _is_ a video driver model which is not
>    limited to use inside X.

No.  3rd party drivers usually cause much more harm than they help.

>    There is alot of anti-third party anything sentiment in the open
>    source community. Often this seems to revolve around the "presumed
>    evil nature" of distributing binary software. If you ask any
>    systems architect (in any field), they will tell you that
>    centralized systems do not work, and "software development" is no
>    exception to thus rule. It does not matter if you have 250
>    volunteer developers, or 15,000 employed developers in Redmond, if
>    you want to support third-party hardware (or software), you HAVE to
>    let the third parties do it themselves.

You haven't seen the average quality of vendor-supplied drivers, have
you?  I've spent singnificant time on fixing some of those up and it's
not pretty.  To quote Werner Almesberger:

"Maybe a good analogy is that drivers are to hardware companies like
 excrements are to living creatures: in order to stay alive, they have
 to produce them, but you don't put much love into their production,
 and their internals (like their development) may be a little
 disgusting."

>    Here is an example of the perspective shift necessary. Recently,
>    Keith explained that users with newly supported Radeon chips had to
>    wait for the Feb 2003 release of Xfree under the heading "slow
>    release schedules". This entire mindset is flawed. There is *NO*
>    release schedule for Xfree which would be fast enough. XFree is
>    packaged with RedHat at a specific time and RedHat is not about to
>    go cut a new master every time Xfree does a release. Furthermore,
>    users simple do not upgrade their Xfree...

Yes they do, as soon as apt-get/up2date/whatever gets them a new errata
from their vendor.

>    GGI has all of these goals in mind, and has done a reasonable job
>    so far given that very few people are using it.

Maybe that's why it's failing? :)