Mesa's Rate Of Git Development Is Slowing

[asdx]

How many Americans do you think have ever heard of "software patents" ?

A lot of people for sure.

[allquixotic]

Fuck software patents. Why don't you guys living in the US vote against that fucking shit? Don't you folks have a say with things like that?

The whole world has to suffer because of the idiotic laws in USA.

No, we don't have a say in things like that. We live in a false democracy which is actually a totalitarian state run by a few rich men. All of them unanimously want to continue with software patents.

In fact, I can't think of any elected official who has ever uttered the words "software patents". If they did, they'd probably be against them, but since everyone in office "plays dumb" about all that technolergy-stuff, it's simply not discussed. They ignore them because it's an inconvenient issue. Even if we elected other people, they wouldn't be able to get elected by campaigning to get rid of software patents. Too many people would either say "oh no, don't do that, Microsoft would go bankrupt!" or they would say "huh? what's software? why are you worrying about that meaningless shit instead of giving me a bigger paycheck?"

That's really what it comes down to these days for most people: they will vote for whoever promises to give them a bigger paycheck, more job security, or a job in the first place. Obviously there's no correlation between politicians promising bigger paychecks (less taxes) and politicians promising to obliterate software patents, so it'll never happen.

[Hamish Wilson]

Fuck software patents. Why don't you guys living in the US vote against that fucking shit? Don't you folks have a say with things like that?

The whole world has to suffer because of the idiotic laws in USA.

Considering here in Canada the Harper government just passed their new copyright law which is in many ways worse than the DMCA I think you may be being a little too hard on the yanks by stating that such problems are their fault exclusively...

[asdx]

What I never understood is why developments like Mesa doesn't happen outside of the US, like in some countries in Europe where US laws doesn't apply.

Wouldn't that make sense? Wouldn't that prevent Mesa developers from being sued over the ST3C patents if they decide to incorporate ST3C by default in Mesa?

[allquixotic]

What I never understood is why developments like Mesa doesn't happen outside of the US, like in some countries in Europe where US laws doesn't apply.

Wouldn't that make sense? Wouldn't that prevent Mesa developers from being sued over the ST3C patents if they decide to incorporate ST3C by default in Mesa?

The general consensus of the Mesa developers is to try and code to the "lowest common denominator", which means they need to take into account the needs of people (especially statistically-significant proportions of their user base, such as USAians) who use their software. They can't just distribute to Europe only. Japan respects U.S. patent law BTW. as do many other countries.

Also the distros that distribute compiled binary code, their situation is even more grim because it's much more likely that a for-profit company (whether or not they sell the distro for money) would be sued for patent infringement by distributing S3TC codecs etc.

[smitty3268]

Fuck software patents. Why don't you guys living in the US vote against that fucking shit? Don't you folks have a say with things like that?

The whole world has to suffer because of the idiotic laws in USA.

We have the same amount of say that you do about getting your government to ignore those laws from the US. The whole world only has to suffer if they agree - it's not like we're invading countries and shooting people who refuse.

Which is to say, theoretically, we can tell our governments what to do. But realistically this issue is backed by huge amounts of money and you and I don't have enough to compete with that.

[galibert]

So...even if the driver works 100% (which I can't say one way or the other), if there aren't any updates, it gets depriciated?

Am I the only person who realizes how idiotic that is?

Also, the fact MESA needs so many drivers for different architectures is why I hope Gallium replaces it. One interface, one backend.

You vision of gallium is somewhat wrong. There currently are 12 backends (4 nvidia, 4 amd, 1 intel, 1 svga, 2 pure X11), not one. And the interface changes on a regular basis to gain new features. At this point I'm not sure gallium can handle GL 3.1 (there may be changes needed for UBO) and I'm certain it can't handle GL 3.2+ (need some things for geometry shaders).

Unmaintained drivers quickly don't work 100% anymore because the API changes for new features and untested updates can only stretch to a point. Or, in other terms, every unmaintained driver eventually stops working 100% (and can end up near 0% very fast in some cases).

OG.

[Kayden]

It's worth noting that 2010 was the year we rewrote the GLSL compiler basically from scratch. So the commit stats might have been a bit abnormally high that year. :) It'll be interesting to see how things stand in December.

Also, OG is right, Gallium doesn't support UBOs, as required by 3.1. But neither does Mesa...or the shared GLSL compiler for that matter. Soon :)

As for unmaintained drivers...it goes without saying that we wouldn't remove a driver that's working 100%. Most of the drivers we've removed were either horrendously broken (i965g), or only supported DRI1. For those that don't remember the bad old days, DRI1 meant that GL applications drew straight onto the screen; there was no way to transform them. With the advent of modern composited desktop environments like GNOME 3, KDE 4, or Compiz, this means no Exposé, no cube switcher, no coverflow alt-tabbing, and so on. Everything would zoom out, but any GL applications would draw smack on top of everything, at full size. It looked horrible and really broke these new user experiences. Since nobody stepped up to convert them to the modern DRI2 interface - even after it'd been around for several years - we decided it was time to remove them, and make our life easier. (Have we mentioned that developing Mesa/Gallium is hard? :))

Plus, Mesa and Gallium are both evolving a lot to incorporate new GL features, and this means reworking and rearchitecting a lot of stuff. Occasionally this means rewriting stuff in all the drivers, which can be a fair bit of work. Less drivers means it's easier to make those kinds of changes. Also, making cross-driver architecture changes can be a bit dodgy - typically the person doing the work only really tests on one system, rather than trying each generation of Radeon, Nvidia, Intel, Matrox, SiS, etc. For drivers that receive little to no actual testing, we don't have a lot of confidence that they still work or will continue to work. Ideally, we'd have them all in a lab, and test everything (and we should!). But let's be honest...there's a lot of people testing r600 or Sandybridge, and not a lot of people using (say) r200.

We did keep compatibility so you can load the drivers from an older Mesa; simply using the older driver means you get less accidental breakage, and since there wasn't really any work being done anyway, you're not really missing out. It's just kind of a pain for packaging.