From: Kevin E M. <ke...@ke...> - 2002-01-17 16:17:55
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On Thu, Jan 17, 2002 at 07:58:01AM -0700, Brian Paul wrote: > ad...@hu... wrote: > > > > Okay, sorry, I just had to laugh. Not your fault, I admit that. You are as innocent as I used to be. > > > > Here's the deal bro: > > > > [RANT MODE ON] > > > > [...] > > > > [RANT MODE OFF] > > > > Finale: > > > > Anyone: please think about it before (if) you respond to this email. If I am wrong in something of course I would like to hear it, but my overall feeling of disappointment in the DRI project is not gonna change easily. If you want to respond, only do it with DRI devel. docs. Otherwise you are probably wasting your and my time. > > OK, I'm going to waste some of your time - I don't have any new DRI docs > for you. > > You're right that the DRI docs are out of date, there's no skeleton/ > example driver, the existing drivers aren't documented very well, and > the DRI authors are no longer available. > > Even before VA Linux laid-off everyone we were losing momentum on the > DRI project because the engineers had to work on other projects that > generated revenue. After everyone was laid-off we all went in different > directions. I think I'm one of the few who still reads this list. > > Most of the DRI authors simply have _no_ time to work on the DRI project. > I have time to read the list, but really nothing more. My spare time > is occupied with developing Mesa. I often wish there were more hours in > a day so I could do more, but there aren't and I can't. Well said Brian. I think it applies to most of us (except substitute the part about Mesa with other projects that the rest of us are heavily involved in). > Back when we were actively writing the DRI drivers we were working > our asses off. Gareth, for example, was routinely working 80+ hours > per week on this stuff. We thought it was more important to invest > our time in the drivers and infrastructure code than writing/updating > design documents. The DRI is very complicated and takes a lot of > time to understand. We didn't try to make it complicated - that's > just the reality of it. Exactly. In fact, Brian (and others) did some great work simplifying the original code that we developed. > The DRI isn't dead though. Keith and Alan have been working on > the mesa-4-0-branch to bring Mesa 4.0 (OpenGL 1.3) to the DRI. > We at Tungsten Graphics have hopes to develop new DRI drivers. > But the top priority is to do the work that pays our bills. > Unfortunately, right now that's not the DRI. Hopefully, someone will see the value in further DRI development and thus fund it. I'm still actively looking and I'm sure the guys at Tungsten Graphics are as well. I'm hopeful this will happen; however, the reality is that after the initial funding for the DRI, the vast majority of the funding we received was soley for driver development. That is what is either in the past and is happening now. Here's a suggestion for moving forward: For those that have the time right now and the technical background, delve into the code and write up what you find. If you post your writeups here, then the DRI community that has built up and hopefully some of the original developers (time permitting) can help clarify and correct the docs. The DRI, Mesa and XFree86 are not simple pieces of code, but perhaps this is a way to help get people over the learning curve required to understand and then contribute code. Regards, Kevin |