RFC: X library package changes, dependancy changes, freedesktop.org xlibs, etc.

[Mike A. Harris]

On Sat, 7 Feb 2004, Alan Cox wrote:

>On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 03:27:52AM -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
>> Thanks again for the feedback!
>
>Sounds good to me. I'd love per chipset packaging so that for
>example XFree86-ati-radeon-blah contained the radeon driver, dri .so and
>related bits, but that I can see is a good deal harder to get right

That is something I definitely want to do in the future also.  
The XFree86-sdk subpackage was created with the intent to enable 
experimentation on splitting out drivers in the future.  Paul 
Nasrat made some proof-of-concept rpms of the ati driver, vga 
driver, and a few others a while back.

The biggest problem with split out drivers is our config tools 
need to be modified to deal with multiple packages, and I need a 
way of knowing wether someone is using an official driver we 
supplied or not easily.  If someone uses a self built driver, I 
need a way of knowing that, so I don't waste a bunch of time on a 
bogus bug report.  Of course that can and does happen now 
already, but it's rarer because it's not as simple as just 
upgrading an rpm from the command line.
 
XFree86 needs something akin to the kernel's tainting flags, and 
having Red Hat signed modules.

Also, the driver rpms should have a metadata file included with 
them which is essentially like a Windows .INF file, which drops 
into a predefined /usr/share/something dir and informs our 
config tools what hardware this new driver supports, etc.  
Basically a modularized replacement for the ancient Cards 
database, and pcitable, where that information is now stored in a 
metadata file accompanying the driver.

That way, a user could install/upgrade a driver, and the config 
tool would know right away what is supported, without having to 
force us to go edit hwdata database files, and update that 
package too, etc.

It's been on my mind for quite some time and I wrote up a 
functional spec on a design a while back, but haven't worked on 
it for a while.  I'll need to revive that, and post it somewhere 
for feedback in the future.

Thanks,
TTYL


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat