I haven't been following this very closely, so apologies if I'm going over established ground.
This patch appears to create new libraries from some subset of Mesa's internals. At a guess you're selecting some internal interface(s) within mesa to become the public API of those libraries? I'm pretty sure that's not something we're trying to achieve in this project.
We have public APIs which we respect and implement, and which are maintained and evolved under the Khronos umbrella.
We have a strong driver-level interface (ie gallium) which we benefit greatly from being rev as fast and as hard as we can, to adapt to our evolving understanding of the problem space. We really don't want to subject that interface to the strictures that come with becoming a public API or ABI.
We have a third interface, the Mesa driver interface, which may appear relatively stable, but which is more accurately described as neglected, veering towards deprecated. The shortcomings of this interface, in particular its porous nature and inappropriate abstraction level, were major catalysts provoking the development of gallium. Those shortcomings would also make it less than appropriate as a public API. At some point in the future, that interface will either roar back into rapid evolution or truly be deprecated in favour of either gallium or a low-level, legacy-free GL3/4 subset from Khronos.
I can't easily tell from your patch what interfaces these new libraries have, or what expectations there would be for maintaining compatibility on those interfaces going forward. I'd like to see that spelled out explicitly. Without investigating further, I can say I'm not aware of any interface within Mesa which we'd be happy to promote to a public interface, nor one which we'd be happy to accept extra restrictions on in terms of compatibility.
Keith
On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:59 PM, Luc Verhaegen libv@skynet.be wrote:
Patch cherry-picked from my dri-sdk-7.8 branch against current head (edb5253dfa). An earlier full build through of all drivers (except nouveau, i will play with its expansive libdrm dependencies later) showed it to be an exact match still.
This patch, while not harming or hampering anything or anyone, gives us the ability to maintain and build DRI drivers out of tree for those so inclined. Build system additions only. No adverse effects. Everybody wins.
I intend to provide changes as needed, I hope to at least manage to maintain released versions in the long term.
For those wanting a test run, please check out the 7.8 version of the SDK and the drivers in my cgit.freedesktop.org repos.
Luc Verhaegen.
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