Re: Driver development vs X development

David Dawes writes:
 > 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.
 > 

My idea was to combine the different parts of a driver XFree86, DRM
kernel and DRI client in one directory structure. This will make
shipping of source level driver by third parties easier as they
can both be included into the SDK and the full tarball.

At the same time it is no longer required to copy individual files
from each driver into the SDK which makes breaking the SDK much less
likely.

The drivers subtree in CVS can be made a separate module so that
updating drivers for the SDK does not involve checking out the entire
tree.

Egbert.