RFC: X library package changes, dependancy changes, freedesktop.org xlibs, etc.

[Bill Nottingham]

Mike A. Harris (mharris at redhat.com) said: 
> >Sounds good to me. I'd love per chipset packaging so that for
> >example XFree86-ati-radeon-blah contained the radeon driver, dri .so and
> >related bits, but that I can see is a good deal harder to get right
> 
> That is something I definitely want to do in the future also.  

One of the great benefits of how the OS is distributed now is that,
for any hardware supported by the OS, they don't need to go looking
for their CDs, or start hitting the network, etc. to get that hardware
supported.

If you go down this road, you all of a sudden change that, and
that's really not good. You also end up having to tie a good deal
of logic into installation programs just to get the right package
installed.

> Also, the driver rpms should have a metadata file included with 
> them which is essentially like a Windows .INF file, which drops 
> into a predefined /usr/share/something dir and informs our 
> config tools what hardware this new driver supports, etc.  
> Basically a modularized replacement for the ancient Cards 
> database, and pcitable, where that information is now stored in a 
> metadata file accompanying the driver.

Well, currently, the drivers all have information on what hardware
they support included. *Unlike* the kernel drivers, they don't
export this in a sane manner.

Bill