Brian Paul wrote: > > 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.
It seems that most of us are still around... > 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. 80? Huh, that was a light week :-) Regarding documentation, and the comparisons to other large projects like the Linux kernel, think back to what it must have been like in the early 90s. Do you think there was anywhere near the amount of documentation there is now on kernel development? Do you think it was easy for people to jump in and start making serious contributions? Writing a whole driver is a *serious* contribution. I'd say it took me about a year of working with various drivers, and watching people like Keith and Brian do their magic, before I felt comfortable in my level of understanding of how the Mesa-based DRI drivers worked and how all the pieces fit together. You really are kidding yourself if you think you'll be able to pick this up in a matter of weeks. Not that this should discourage you from working on the DRI or Mesa... While we're making comparisons with the Linux kernel, you need to think in terms of porting the kernel to a new architecture, or maintaining one of the core bits like the VM, networking, VFS etc, instead of a character device driver for the real-time clock, say, when you think about writing a solid, fully-featured driver for a modern 3D graphics processor. To continue the comparisons with the kernel, how much documentation do you think there is on the bleeding-edge work being done by the core developers? Is there a "How To Hack On The New 2.4.10 VM" document anywhere? Or "Ten Easy Steps For Writing Your Own Kernel-Based HTTP Server"? "DaveM's Guide To The TCP/IP Stack"? -- Gareth _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
