On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 03:28:49AM +1000, Gareth Hughes wrote:
> Digital Z-Man wrote:
> >
> > Well, anyone who wants to, IMO.
>
> In theory, yes. In practice? Not really. Sure, the odd patch is
> submitted, but that's about it. Not much else has come from the "open
> source community"...
Having seen it from both sides I'd say there were 3 big reasons for the
lack of general community input.
- poor documentation for development purposes. hardware doco
isn't available to the general public. DRI documentation is
patchy overall and non-existent at the coding level.
- the DRI is complicated. you need to know opengl, xfree86 &
low-level driver coding. it's not something you can quickly
reduce into easier to digest chunks.
These two are time related. The DRI is a new project. Using Mozilla for
a yardstick I'd guess it'll be 2 years before the DRI design is settled
and decent documentation appears.
- DRI development is not very open. i occasionally see words
of wisdom from DRI developers, but if you hang out on linux
kernel you can see that the dri-devel is relatively silent.
This is the real problem. I don't see nearly enough discussions held on
the dri-devel lists. This is probably because there are so very few DRI
developers and they're always busy.
The barrier-to-entry to DRI development is extremely high. I don't know
an easy fix. I'd guess that at this early stage - when the DRI needs to
be rapidly prototyped and the design fleshed out - you need a small but
smart group of developers. Only when the design is fairly complete will
there be significant value from the community.
--
The more I know about the WIN32 API the more I dislike it. It is complex and
for the most part poorly designed, inconsistent, and poorly documented.
- David Korn
_______________________________________________
Dri-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
