On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 02:56:32PM -0700, Matt Dew wrote: > This I'm curious about. Are there more companies that feel it's > too-hard/not-worth-while for companies to contribute stuff to Xorg? > I know the linux kernel has this issue, but is X's contribution > difficulty larger?
I think X faces the problem that our approach to code quality is pretty similar to the kernel, but the number of skilled coders with domain experience is much smaller. There's a pretty strong cultural mismatch between our willingness to accept patches and people's willingness to submit them. Vendors are willing to argue that their component suppliers have in-kernel drivers, but X.org's modular development model makes it far easier for those suppliers to argue that an "out of tree" X driver is equivalent to something that's maintained within X.org. The unsurprising outcome is that drivers in X.org only tend to be regularly updated if they have someone who can work with the X.org community. If they don't, it's far easier to keep the code in their own tree. Working out ways to improve this situation would seem worthwhile, but simply being more enthusiastic about accepting contributions doesn't seem like a great plan (compare the code quality of nouveau, intel and radeon to that of some of the out of tree drivers, for instance) -- Matthew Garrett | mj...@srcf.ucam.org _______________________________________________ xorg@lists.freedesktop.org: X.Org support Archives: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg Info: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg Your subscription address: arch...@mail-archive.com